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Cabbage Salad
Chop the cabbage fine, sprinkle with salt and let stand over night. Beat one egg thoroughly and add to one-half pint of boiling vinegar; rub two tablespoons of mustard into more vinegar to make a smooth paste; add this to the boiling vinegar; pepper and sugar to taste. Let all come to boil, and pour over the cabbage, stirring thoroughly.
— Mrs. E. Sadlemire
A boiled dressing slaw of the sort that predates bottled mayonnaise. The dressing is a cooked custard thickened by egg alone, so the heat management is the whole recipe.
- The hinge: temper the eggPouring a beaten egg straight into boiling vinegar will scramble it into threads. Whisk a ladle of the hot vinegar into the egg first, return the mixture to the pan, and keep it just below a simmer while it thickens; the "let all come to boil" of the original is what ruins most attempts.
- Half a pint of vinegarOne cup. The extra vinegar used to slake the mustard is unmeasured — two or three tablespoons is enough to make a smooth paste.
- MustardTwo tablespoons of dry mustard powder, not prepared mustard from a jar. That quantity is assertive by modern standards; one tablespoon gives a dressing closer to current taste.
- The overnight saltingA tablespoon of salt to a medium head is plenty. In the morning the cabbage will have wept a good deal of liquid — drain it and squeeze it in a towel, or the dressing will be watered down. Do not add more salt afterwards without tasting.
- Sugar to tasteFor a cup of vinegar, start at two tablespoons and go up. Nineteenth-century cider vinegar varied in strength, while commercial vinegar today is generally sold at about 5 percent acidity, so taste as you sweeten.
- Serving and keepingOne medium head dressed this way serves six to eight. Pour the dressing on hot, toss, then chill for several hours — it thickens and settles as it cools, and keeps three or four days refrigerated.
Boiled dressings like this one were common as a salad sauce in American home cooking through the nineteenth century: vinegar, mustard, sugar and an egg, cooked in a pan on the stove, with no oil at all and none of the whisking that mayonnaise demands. They belonged to a kitchen where eggs were plentiful, salad oil was an expensive store-bought item, and cabbage was one of the few vegetables that could be counted on from a cellar in February. The word coleslaw itself is generally traced to the Dutch koolsalade or koolsla, cabbage salad, which is precisely how this contributor titles it. The signature matters too — this is a signed contribution of the kind found in community-compiled books, where each recipe carried a neighbour's name with it, and where an instruction like "pepper and sugar to taste" assumed a reader who already knew what the dish should taste like.