Warm Slaw
Cut the cabbage very fine and sprinkle over it a tablespoonful flour. Put a piece of butter, the size of an egg, in the oven to melt. Salt and pepper the cabbage and put it in the oven with the butter. Mix half a teacup of cream with the same quantity of vinegar, pour it over the cabbage and heat thoroughly.-Mrs. S. G.
Warm Slaw.
Cut the cabbage (hard red is best) as for cold slaw. Put in a saucepan one-quarter pound butter, two gills water, three gills vinegar, one teaspoonful salt, and a little cayenne pepper. If you like, add a garlic, minced fine. When this mixture has come to a boil, pour it boiling hot over the cabbage, and cover it five or ten minutes, when it will be ready for use. Warm Slaw.
Wash the cabbage, cut fine and put on the fire with enough water to keep it from burning.
When sufficiently tender, have ready a dressing made of vinegar, pepper, salt, mustard, a spoonful of butter rolled in flour, and beaten eggs, all thoroughly mixed. Stir this quickly in the cabbage and let it boil up.--Mrs. Col. W.
Three versions of the same idea sit under one heading here: shredded cabbage wilted with a hot butter-and-vinegar dressing. The second is the most robust and the third the most delicate, since it is thickened with egg.
- Gills and teacupsA gill is half a cup, so the second recipe wants 1 cup water and 1½ cups vinegar to a quarter pound (1 stick) of butter. A teacup was never a fixed measure, and is usually reckoned at roughly ¾ cup — in the first recipe equal parts cream and vinegar is the point, not the exact volume.
- Butter the size of an eggUsually reckoned at about 2 ounces (¼ cup). The phrase turns up often in nineteenth-century American books, but it is an approximation rather than a fixed measure.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold cider vinegar of the period was variable and often milder than today's standardised 5 percent. A cup of water to 1½ cups of modern distilled vinegar will taste harshly sharp; cider vinegar, and cutting the vinegar with more water, gets closer to the intended balance.
- "Put it in the oven"In the first recipe this means a dish set in the oven of a wood range to warm through; no temperature is given. A skillet over low heat does the same job and gives better control.
- "A garlic"Probably one clove rather than a whole head.
- The egg dressingThe third version is the one that can fail. Beaten eggs stirred into hot cabbage will scramble if the pan is hot and the stirring slow; keep the heat low, stir constantly, and take it off as soon as it thickens. "Let it boil up" meant a single surge, not a rolling boil.
- Red cabbageThe acid in the second recipe is what keeps hard red cabbage bright — without vinegar it turns a dull blue-grey. Pour the dressing on boiling hot and cover, as directed; the residual heat does the wilting.
- YieldNone of the three gives a quantity of cabbage. A medium head, about 2 lb shredded, serves six as a side dish and suits the dressing quantities in the second recipe.
Warm slaw is the younger half of a pair: koolsla, Dutch for cabbage salad, came into American English through New York and was reanalyzed as "cold slaw," with a heated counterpart formed later by analogy, which cookbooks are often said to have rendered as "hot slaw" and, by ear, "warm slaw." The hot vinegar-and-fat dressing poured over raw shredded cabbage is a technique shared with Pennsylvania German and broader Northern European cooking, and it survives in modern wilted salads. That Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877) prints three versions side by side, only some of them signed, is characteristic of the book: Marion Cabell Tyree gathered recipes from some 250 Virginia housekeepers and let their variations stand rather than reconciling them, so the reader sees the plain butter version, the sharp boiled-dressing version, and the richer egg-thickened one all at once.