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Cabbage Salad
One quart cabbage cut finely, 1¼ cups vinegar, 1 teaspoon mustard, 1 egg, 1 teaspoon butter, 1/4 cup Five Roses flour, 1/2 cup sugar. Boil all together until thick, then add cabbage.
A boiled dressing coleslaw of the type common before bottled mayonnaise. The whole of the work is in the cooked dressing; the cabbage is simply folded in raw at the end.
- The vinegar figure is broken"14 cups vinegar" cannot be right against half a cup of sugar and a quarter cup of flour. It is likely a mangled 1/4 or 1 1/4 cups, though there is no way to know which. Start low and thin the finished dressing to the consistency you want.
- A quart of cut cabbageMeasured loosely after shredding, a quart is roughly 10 to 12 oz, perhaps a quarter of a large head. Shred it fine, as directed — coarse cabbage will not take up a thick dressing.
- Mix the dry things firstWhisk the flour, sugar and mustard together dry, then beat in the egg and add the vinegar gradually. Flour dropped into hot vinegar lumps immediately and no amount of beating recovers it.
- "Boil until thick" means a bare simmer"Boil until thick" -- Bring it up slowly over moderate heat, stirring constantly, until it coats the spoon — three to five minutes. The flour gives the egg a good deal of protection, but a hard rolling boil still risks graining the dressing.
- The vinegar has changedThe vinegar may have differed -- Household vinegar of the period was far less standardised than today's 5 per cent bottling, and its strength varied. Taste the dressing before you commit it to the cabbage and add water if it bites.
- Cool before combiningCombining -- The recipe adds the cabbage after cooking, but says nothing about cooling. Letting the dressing come down to at least warm first will keep the cabbage from wilting and weeping.
- Yield and keepingServes six as a side. It improves after two or three hours in the refrigerator and holds a day or two, though the flour-thickened dressing thins as the cabbage releases water.
Boiled dressing was the standard salad sauce in Canadian and American home kitchens well into the twentieth century: flour, sugar, mustard, an egg and vinegar, cooked to a custard-like thickness. Its presence in the Five Roses Cook Book, a promotional volume issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and built from recipes sent in by women who used the flour, is doubly explained: it is a genuine everyday salad, and it uses flour where a modern cook would reach for oil. The name coleslaw comes from the Dutch koolsalade, cabbage salad, which is exactly what this recipe is called here.