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German Salad (Throw a pint of sauerkraut)
Throw a pint of sauerkraut into boiling water five minutes. Drain, wash well in cold water. Cut into shreds sufficient red cabbage to make one pint, mix this with the sauerkraut. Chop one good-sized onion very fine, add to this a tablespoonful of chopped Chervil, one tablespoonful of grated horse-radish. Arrange endive neatly in a salad bowl, put this mixture in the centre, cover with French dressing and serve.
Despite the homely things that this salad contains it is delicious.
A raw-and-cooked cabbage salad that depends on rinsing the brine out of the sauerkraut. Everything else is knife work.
- The hinge: blanch and rinseThe five minutes in boiling water and the cold rinse are what make the dish work — they strip the harsh brine and soften the sourness so the kraut reads as a vegetable rather than a condiment. Skip it and the French dressing has nothing to balance. Squeeze the kraut dry after rinsing or the dressing will slide off.
- A pint, by volumeBoth the sauerkraut and the shredded red cabbage are measured loosely packed by volume: a pint is 2 cups each. A pint of kraut is roughly 8-10 oz drained; a pint of shredded red cabbage is about a quarter of a small head.
- ChervilA soft anise-scented herb sold fresh in a few markets and easy to grow, but it wilts within days and does not dry well. Flat-leaf parsley with a pinch of tarragon is the usual stand-in.
- Grated horse-radishThe original means the fresh root, peeled and grated at the last minute. Prepared horseradish from a jar already contains vinegar, and creamed versions add dairy — either works, but cut the vinegar in the dressing to compensate.
- French dressing, 1900 senseNot the sweet orange bottled dressing but a plain vinaigrette: about three parts oil to one part vinegar, salt and pepper, whisked. Given the kraut, keep the vinegar restrained.
- EndiveProbably curly endive (frisée) rather than Belgian endive, which was less common in American markets at this date. Either works.
- Yield and timingNo yield is given; the quantities would serve about four as a side salad. Dress it just before serving — once dressed the red cabbage bleeds and will tint the kraut.
Sauerkraut in an American salad bowl in this period is a marker of German-American cooking moving into mainstream household books, where it more often appeared hot than dressed cold. Naming a dish "German salad" seems to have been a matter of labelling by association rather than origin — the combination of kraut, onion, horseradish and chervil is a fair sketch of a Central European table, though no single German original is documented for it. The closing line, defending the dish "despite the homely things" it contains, tells you something about the audience: cabbage and onion were cheap and rural in connotation, and a writer recommending them in the salad course expected to have to argue the point.