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Cabbage Salad
Cut into shreds the centre of a perfectly white, hard head of cabbage, arrange neatly in a salad bowl, cover with Mayonnaise and serve.
A three-line recipe that assumes you already have mayonnaise on hand and know what to do with a cabbage. The whole dish turns on the cut and on dressing it at the last minute.
- The cabbage"Perfectly white, hard head" means a dense winter white or Dutch cabbage, not savoy or napa. The pale inner leaves are sweeter and less sulphurous than the green outer ones, which is why the recipe specifies the centre; save the outer leaves for braising or soup.
- Shred fineShreds should be no more than 1/8 inch wide - thin enough to bend under the dressing rather than stand up in it. A mandoline or the shredding disc of a food processor does this in seconds; a knife works if the half-head is laid cut-side down and sliced across the grain.
- Crisp it firstFifteen minutes in ice water, then dried thoroughly in a towel or spun in a salad spinner, gives noticeably crisper shreds. Wet cabbage thins mayonnaise into a puddle, so the drying is not optional.
- Mayonnaise in 1900Mayonnaise of the period -- The book's own mayonnaise would be hand-whisked oil and raw yolk, and probably looser than jarred mayonnaise today. If you make it, use pasteurized eggs, since nothing in this salad is cooked. Commercial mayonnaise is stiffer and benefits from being loosened with a spoonful of lemon juice or cream.
- Season separatelyNo salt appears in the instruction, presumably because the dressing carried it. Taste the shredded cabbage on its own and salt it lightly before dressing; unsalted cabbage under salty mayonnaise tastes flat in the middle.
- Dress at the tableSalt in the dressing draws water out of the shreds fairly quickly. Arrange the cabbage in the bowl ahead, keep it cold, and spoon the mayonnaise over just before it goes out - the recipe's word "cover" suggests a blanket on top rather than a tossed slaw.
- YieldThe heart of one medium head gives several cups of shreds, enough for about four to six side servings with roughly 3/4 cup of mayonnaise.
This is coleslaw at the moment it was trying to become a salad. The name is generally traced to the Dutch koolsla, from kool and sla, cabbage salad, carried into American cooking through New York, and older versions were dressed with hot vinegar, butter and sometimes a boiled egg dressing. What marks this version as turn-of-the-century is the mayonnaise: emulsified oil-and-yolk sauce moved from the professional kitchen into the domestic one during the late nineteenth century, and vegetable cookbooks of the period often seem to lean on it heavily, sometimes giving a single mayonnaise recipe in the dressings chapter and then referring back to it for a dozen salads. The instruction to "arrange neatly in a salad bowl" and cover, rather than toss, may also reflect the service of the period, when a salad was often presented as a composed dish and disturbed as little as possible before reaching the table.