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Cold Slaw
1 quart of cut cabbage, 1/2 cup of cream (sour is best), 2 tablespoonfuls of vinegar, 2 eggs, 1 teaspoonful of salt, A little pepper, Butter the size of a walnut.
Cut the cabbage very fine and put it in an earthen bowl. Put the vinegar on to boil. Beat the eggs until light, add to them the cream and butter. Now add to these the boiling vinegar. Stir over the fire until boiling hot, add the salt and pepper, and pour over the cabbage, and it is ready to serve when very cold.
A boiled dressing for cabbage, of the type that preceded bottled mayonnaise in American kitchens. The whole thing hangs on cooking the eggs without scrambling them.
- The hinge: don't let it curdleAdding boiling vinegar directly to beaten eggs will scramble them unless the vinegar goes in slowly, in a thin stream, with constant whisking. Then cook the mixture over low heat or in a double boiler, stirring, until it thickens and just reaches a bare simmer — a full rolling boil will break it.
- Butter the size of a walnutAbout 1 tablespoon, or a little more. Shelled walnut, not in the shell.
- Sour creamThe "sour cream" here is naturally soured raw cream, thinner and sharper than the cultured sour cream sold today. Modern full-fat sour cream works, thinned with a spoonful of milk; crème fraîche is closer in texture and less likely to break under heat.
- VinegarCider vinegar of this period was not standardised and its strength varied from batch to batch; today's 5 percent cider vinegar is a reasonable stand-in. Two tablespoons is a modest amount for a half cup of cream, so the dressing is mild efore it goes on the cabbage b taste and add more before it goes on the cabbage.
- Cutting the cabbage"Very fine" means shredded to shreds, not chopped: quarter and core the head and slice across the grain as thinly as you can, or use a mandoline. Coarse chunks will not take up the dressing.
- The earthen bowlThe recipe does not say why, but earthenware avoids any reaction between the vinegar and unlined metal. Glass, ceramic or stainless steel is fine; avoid aluminium and cast iron.
- Serving coldDress the cabbage while the sauce is hot, then chill at least an hour. It softens and weeps a little as it stands; drain off excess liquid before serving.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of cabbage and no yield. As a rough guide, this is about enough dressing for a small head, serving six as a side.
"Cold slaw" is a folk respelling of the Dutch koolsla, cabbage salad, which entered American English through New York and its Hudson Valley Dutch households; in koolsla, kool is the cabbage and sla the salad, so slaw does descend from the word for salad, and cookbooks of the nineteenth century also printed "hot slaw" for the wilted version. Boiled dressings like this one — eggs, vinegar, cream and a little butter, thickened over the fire — were common in American kitchens for much of the 1800s, and well suited to a kitchen where good salad oil was expensive and often rancid. Cabbage earned its place in books of this kind because it kept in a cellar all winter, which made slaw one of the few fresh-tasting vegetable dishes available in February.