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Red Cabbage and Celery Salad
I crisp red cabbage 1 cupful cut celery Salt and pepper Lemon juice and oil 1 teaspoonful onion juice Mayonnaise dressing Chop the tenderest leaves of a red cabbage very fine. Mix it with the celery and moisten with lemon juice and oil, and season with salt and pepper. Add the onion juice.
Allow to remain in a cool place for half an hour.
Divide into dainty casseroles and cover with mayonnaise dressing.
A dressed slaw rather than a cooked dish, and one of the few recipes in a casserole book that never sees the fire. The instructions are sound; only the vessels and a couple of the ingredient names need translating.
- "Dainty casseroles"Small individual earthenware or fireproof-china dishes rather than one large baking dish; 'divide into' makes the individual serving clear. Any small bowl, cocotte or wide glass serves the same purpose; the salad is served cold in them.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion on a fine rasp and press the pulp through a sieve, or grate it straight into the bowl and discard the fibrous remains. A teaspoonful is a seasoning, not a vegetable — it should read as background sharpness.
- Unspecified lemon and oilThe original gives no quantity. For one small cabbage and a cup of celery, roughly 3 tablespoons oil to 1 tablespoon lemon juice is a workable starting point; the point is to moisten and slightly soften the leaves, not to drown them.
- Cutting the cabbage"Very fine" means it. Red cabbage leaves are thick and waxy, and a coarse chop stays tough through the whole half hour of standing. Quarter, core, and slice into shreds no wider than a match.
- The half hour mattersThe acid in the lemon juice slightly softens the shredded cabbage and brightens its colour, since the pigment reddens in acid. Left much longer the celery will begin to lose its snap, so it is best made shortly before serving.
- MayonnaiseMade by hand with raw yolk at this date, and acidulated with vinegar or lemon rather than bought ready-made. If you make your own, use pasteurised eggs; if you buy it, thin it with a spoonful of lemon juice so it spoons over the salad rather than sitting on it in a dome.
- YieldOne small cabbage and a cupful of celery fills four to six of the small casseroles as a side salad.
Books of this sort appeared in numbers in the first years of the twentieth century, when the glazed earthenware casserole came into fashion in American and British kitchens as both a cooking vessel and a serving one, and publishers hurried out volumes to show householders what to do with the newly modish equipment. A cold salad has no business in a casserole book on culinary grounds; it is here because the individual casserole doubled as a fashionable little serving dish, and a course served in matching ramekins looked deliberate at table. The salad itself belongs to the long line of red cabbage preparations dressed with vinegar or lemon or colour as for flavour, since raw red cabbage acts as a crude pH indicator and turns blue-grey in alkaline company. Celery, then a comparatively expensive winter vegetable often served in its own tall glass on the table, was a marker of a well-set household, which is part of why it turns up so persistently in salads of this period.