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Dressing for Cold Slaw
1 cup of vinegar. 2 eggs well beaten. 1 teaspoonful salt. 1 teaspoonful mustard. 1 tablespoonful sugar. 1 tablespoonful butter. A little black pepper. Mix together the butter, salt, pepper, sugar, mustard; add the eggs last. Have the vinegar boiling and pour it on, stirring all the time. Then pour it back in the saucepan and boil a few minutes. Pour on the slaw when cold.--Miss N.
This is a boiled dressing — the standard American cabbage-salad sauce before bottled mayonnaise. It is essentially a vinegar custard, and it succeeds or fails on how you handle the eggs.
- The hinge: temper, then barely cookPouring boiling vinegar onto beaten eggs in a thin stream while whisking hard is what keeps them from scrambling. Back in the pan, the mixture wants low heat and constant stirring only until it coats a spoon, around 170-180F; the "boil a few minutes" of the original will curdle it in a modern thin-bottomed saucepan.
- Mustard means dry mustardMustard here is most likely dry mustard -- A teaspoon of mustard rubbed in with the salt, pepper and sugar is very probably ground mustard powder rather than prepared mustard from a jar. Rub it into the sugar and butter so it dissolves rather than clumping.
- Vinegar strengthA full cup of vinegar is aggressive by current taste, and modern distilled vinegar at 5 percent acidity may well be sharper than the cider vinegar likely intended here. Cider vinegar, or vinegar cut with a few tablespoons of water, gives a closer result.
- Butter quantityOne tablespoon is all the fat in the dressing, so the texture is lean and tart rather than creamy. Whisking in a second tablespoon off the heat at the end smooths it without changing the character.
- Cool it fully"Pour on the slaw when cold" is not incidental — warm dressing wilts shredded cabbage within minutes. Chill the dressing completely, then dress the slaw shortly before serving.
- YieldAbout a cup and a quarter of dressing, enough for a medium head of cabbage, roughly 8 to 10 servings. It keeps a few days covered in the refrigerator and thickens as it sits; loosen with a little water.
- Strain if neededIf threads of cooked egg appear, pass the finished dressing through a fine sieve. Nothing is lost, and the result is indistinguishable from a batch that behaved.
"Cold slaw" is a folk-etymological reshaping of coleslaw — from the Dutch koolsla, itself short for koolsalade, cabbage salad — by English speakers who heard "cole" as "cold"; the dish entered American cookbooks as coleslaw, cold slaw, and occasionally the back-formed "hot slaw" for the same cabbage served warm. Cooked dressings like this one are common in nineteenth-century recipe books, though mayonnaise appears in them too; a vinegar-and-egg sauce thickened over the fire held for days in a cool larder and suited the assertive flavor of raw cabbage. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housekeepers, is full of such attributed fragments — "Miss N." is one of many named and initialed contributors, and the book's value lies precisely in its being a collection of what particular households actually did rather than a single author's ideal.