Slaw
Chop fine one head of cabbage put in a pan. 1 cup cream. 1/1/2 teaspoonful mustard. 1 teaspoonful salt. 1 tablespoonful butter. 1 tablespoonful sugar. And yolk of one egg, beaten light.
When boiled add one-half cup of strong vinegar; stir well and pour over the cabbage.--Mrs. E. T.
A boiled-dressing slaw of the old school: no mayonnaise, but a cooked custard of cream, egg yolk and vinegar poured hot over raw cabbage. The whole thing turns on how you handle the egg.
- The hinge: never let the yolk boilThe instruction "when boiled" refers to the cream mixture, and it needs a gentle hand once the yolk goes in. Heat over low heat or a water bath, stirring, until it thickens to coat a spoon (about 170-175F); a true rolling boil will scramble the yolk into grains.
- Add the vinegar off the heatThe recipe adds the vinegar after the mixture has boiled, though it does not say to pull the pan off the fire. Do so anyway: acid stirred into hot dairy can curdle it. Stir the vinegar in gradually.
- The garbled mustard measure"1/1/2 teaspoonful" is a printer's error, most likely 1 1/2 teaspoons. Dry mustard powder is the likelier reading for unqualified "mustard" in a recipe of this date, though the recipe itself does not specify.
- CreamNineteenth-century cream was unstandardised and often closer to today's heavy cream. Use heavy or whipping cream; half-and-half will thin the dressing and is likelier to break.
- Strong vinegarHousehold vinegar of the period was unstandardised, and "strong" vinegar could be sharper than the modern 5 percent bottling. Start with a scant half cup, taste, and add the rest only if the dressing needs sharpening.
- CabbageOne head means a firm green cabbage, roughly 2 lb, shredded fine rather than chopped in chunks. Salt is already in the dressing, so there is no need to salt and drain first.
- Dress hot, serve coolPouring the hot dressing over the raw cabbage wilts it slightly and lets it absorb the seasoning. Toss, then chill an hour; it thickens as it cools.
- YieldServes six to eight as a side. It keeps two or three days refrigerated, though the cabbage softens and weeps.
Cooked or "boiled" dressings like this one were common before commercial mayonnaise was widely available, and were one of the usual ways of dressing cabbage in nineteenth-century American kitchens, when cream, vinegar and mustard were always to hand. The word slaw comes to English from Dutch koolsla (from kool, cabbage, and sla, a shortening of salade), which gave American English cole slaw, often clipped further to plain "slaw," as here. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, which is why the recipe carries initials rather than a byline and why it reads as terse kitchen shorthand between women who already knew what a boiled dressing should look like.