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Dressing for Cabbage
The yolk of an egg. 1 teaspoonful salt. 1 teaspoonful mustard. 2 teaspoonfuls sugar, mashed smooth. 1 cup of cream. Vinegar to your taste --Mrs. E. C. G.
This is a cold cream dressing for slaw, given as a list of proportions with no cooking step at all — and that absence is the problem.
- The raw yolk is never cookedNothing here brings the egg to any temperature. Many nineteenth-century cabbage dressings were stirred over hot water or thickened in a pan until they coated a spoon; this one is not, and a raw yolk held at room temperature in a bowl of cream carries a real Salmonella risk. Use a current dressing recipe, one that either cooks the base or calls for pasteurized eggs.
- The vinegar is not a safeguard"Vinegar to your taste" gives no quantity, so there is no way to know the acidity of the finished dressing. Acid at unmeasured levels does not reliably make a raw-egg emulsion safe, and taste alone will not tell you where you have landed.
- The cream was a different productCream in the 1870s would generally have been raw, skimmed from milk that had stood, whether from the household's own cow or bought in. Modern cream is pasteurized, which removes one hazard but not the egg.
- "Mashed smooth"In the text the instruction attaches to the sugar. Mustard would most likely have been dry powder and the sugar lump or loaf sugar, which would need working smooth to avoid a gritty dressing.
- ScaleThe recipe gives no yield: one cup of cream with a single yolk makes a modest bowl of dressing, enough for a household-sized dish of slaw.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and first published in 1878, is a collection of contributions from named and initialled Virginia housekeepers, which is why this entry ends with "Mrs. E. C. G." rather than a byline. Dressings of this type — yolk, dry mustard, sugar, cream and vinegar — belong to the older family of cold slaw sauces that predate bottled mayonnaise, and they sit closer to a sweet-sour dressing than to anything emulsified. Sweetened cabbage dressings appear widely in American regional cookbooks, and mustard and vinegar are long-standing elements of English salad dressings. The extreme brevity is typical of the book, which assumes a reader who already knows what a slaw dressing should look like.