Cold Slaw
Wash well and shred fine, a firm white cabbage.
Boil one teacup vinegar.
One tablespoonful butter in a little flour, stir this in the vinegar. Beat the yolks of four eggs till light and stir also in the mixture, just before taking from the fire.
Add mustard, pepper and salt to the butter and flour before putting in the vinegar.
Pour all, when hot, over the cabbage and set away to cool.--Mrs. M. C. Cold Slaw.
Wash your cabbage and lay in cold water some hours. Have a seasoning of egg, mustard, oil, pepper, salt, celery-seed and vinegar and pour over it. In winter the slaw will keep a day or two.--Mrs. W.
Take well headed lettuce, chop it fine and pour over a dressing made of salt and pepper, mustard, hard-boiled egg, and olive oil. Cream the yolk of the egg and mustard together with a little oil, until quite smooth. Add vinegar if desired.--Mrs. R.
Lettuce Dressed. Lettuce chopped fine. 1/2 cup vinegar. 1/2 cup ice-water. 1 tablespoonful white sugar. 1 teaspoonful salt. 1 saltspoonful cayenne. 2 hard-boiled eggs chopped. 1 onion chopped. 1 tablespoonful made mustard. 1 tablespoonful of olive oil.--Mrs. S. T.
Four dressings under two headings: a cooked boiled dressing, an uncooked one, and two lettuce versions. The first is the one worth learning, and the one most likely to go wrong.
- The hinge: do not boil the yolksIn Mrs. M. C.'s version the beaten yolks go into hot vinegar "just before taking from the fire." Pull the pan off the heat, stream in a ladle of the hot vinegar to temper the yolks first, then return the lot to low heat and stir until it thickens to coating consistency. Let it come to a boil and it curdles into vinegary scrambled egg.
- Teacup and saltspoonA teacup in this period is not a modern measuring cup; sources of the day put it anywhere from about 1/2 to 3/4 cup, so start at the low end and add. A saltspoonful is about 1/4 teaspoon, so Mrs. S. T.'s cayenne is a genuine quarter teaspoon and will be assertive.
- "One tablespoonful butter in a little flour"This is a small roux: melt the tablespoon of butter and stir in flour; the recipe says only "a little," so a scant tablespoon is a reasonable reading. Cook a minute, then work in the mustard, pepper and salt before the vinegar goes in, as the recipe directs. Adding the vinegar off the heat and in stages avoids lumps.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold vinegar of the 1870s was variable and often sharper than today's 5 percent cider vinegar; equally, some was weaker. Taste the finished dressing and cut it with a spoonful of water or a pinch of sugar if it stings.
- "Made mustard"Prepared mustard from a jar, not dry powder. Where the recipes just say "mustard" alongside oil and eggs, either works; if using dry mustard, start with a teaspoon and let it sit a few minutes to bloom.
- The uncooked dressings and raw eggMrs. W.'s and Mrs. R.'s versions bind raw or hard-boiled yolk with oil, essentially a mayonnaise. Use pasteurized eggs if the yolk stays raw, and refrigerate; the claim that "in winter the slaw will keep a day or two" assumes an unheated larder, not a modern kitchen.
- Soaking the cabbageThe long soak in cold water crisps the shreds and is still worth doing. Drain and dry them thoroughly, in a towel or a salad spinner, or the dressing will slide off and pool.
- YieldThe recipes give no weight or serving count. A single firm cabbage shredded will feed a table of six or so, and the dressing quantities look broadly matched to one head; the cooked one thickens further as it cools, so judge it slightly loose.
"Cold slaw" is a folk respelling of coleslaw, from the Dutch koolsla, cabbage salad, which entered American English through the Dutch-settled areas of New York and was often reinterpreted as the opposite of a hot slaw. Both spellings had currency in the nineteenth century. What is striking in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), edited by Marion Cabell Tyree, is the format: contributions were gathered from Virginia housekeepers (here identified only by initials) and set side by side rather than reduced to one version, so the page preserves four households' opinions on the same problem. Cooked vinegar-and-yolk dressings of this kind long predate jarred commercial mayonnaise, which did not appear until the twentieth century; the lettuce versions call for olive oil, which in post-war Virginia was an imported article.