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Salad for Slaw
3 eggs well beaten. Nearly a cup of sugar. 1 tablespoonful butter. 1 tablespoonful mustard. Pepper and salt to your taste. Tumbler of milk. Tumbler of vinegar.
Stir well over the fire until as thick as custard. Let it cool and pour over cabbage.--Mrs. R. A.
A boiled dressing of the sweet-sour type that served Southern and Midwestern kitchens long before jarred mayonnaise. It is straightforward, but the eggs will scramble if the pan gets away from you.
- The hinge: keep it below a simmerCook the mixture over gentle heat, stirring constantly, until it coats a spoon like thin custard — around 175-180F. A double boiler is the safe route; direct heat works only with a heavy pan and unbroken attention. If it boils, the egg curdles and no amount of whisking brings it back.
- "Tumbler"A drinking tumbler of the period generally held 6 to 8 fluid ounces. Treat it as one cup of milk and one cup of vinegar, and expect a sharp, thin-bodied dressing that firms as it cools.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold cider vinegar in the 1870s was not standardised and varied in strength from batch to batch. Against a cup of milk, a cup of modern 5 percent vinegar is aggressive; cutting it with water, or using a milder cider vinegar, brings it closer to a workable balance.
- "Mustard"A tablespoonful of mustard here is most likely dry mustard powder rather than prepared condiment. Prepared mustard would add still more vinegar and blunt the heat.
- The sugarNearly a cup is a great deal by current taste and gives a frankly sweet dressing. Halving it brings it nearer modern taste, and the dressing still sets.
- The milk will look curdledMilk and a full cup of vinegar separate on contact. This is normal for boiled dressings; the mixture generally smooths as the egg thickens. Whisk rather than stir if the surface looks broken.
- Yield and dressing the cabbageEnough for a large head of cabbage, about 2 to 2 1/2 lb shredded. Pour it over cold, thoroughly dried cabbage and let it sit half an hour before serving.
- KeepingBeing egg-based, it belongs in the refrigerator and is best within four or five days. It thickens considerably when chilled; loosen with a spoonful of milk.
Boiled dressing of this kind — eggs, sugar, mustard, vinegar and milk cooked to a custard — was the standard American salad sauce through the nineteenth century, when oil was costly, often rancid, and hand-beaten mayonnaise was a labour few households undertook for a dish of cabbage. The word slaw comes from the Dutch koolsla, cabbage salad, which is also why the older spelling "cold slaw" persisted in print for decades, on the mistaken assumption that the first element, "cole" (cabbage), meant "cold". Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, was assembled from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, which is why so many entries are signed only with initials as this one is — a recipe passed along in the voice of the woman who made it rather than an editor's standardised text. Commercial mayonnaise did not reach American grocery shelves in quantity until the following century, and versions of this cooked dressing outlasted it in home kitchens well into the twentieth.