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Cabbage Cold Slaw
Cabbage, shredded Salt Bacon, cut in small pieces Pepper About ½ or ⅔ C Vinegar Nellie Ray.
Cut bacon up into small pieces and fry. Then add vinegar to suit taste and pour over cabbage while hot. Add a little salt and pepper and Christina D. Kern. 6 Spanish onions
A hot bacon-and-vinegar slaw of the German-American kind, set down in the compressed shorthand community cookbooks used when everyone already knew the dish. The page has also been scrambled in printing, so read it with that in mind.
- The vinegar quantity is not recoverable"About 12 or 23 C Vinegar" is a mangled fraction, most likely 1/2 or 2/3 cup, but the original cannot be read with confidence. The instruction "add vinegar to suit taste" is the real guide: start with a few tablespoons into the hot bacon fat and taste.
- Stray lines from neighbouring recipesStray lines and names -- Community cookbooks print the contributor's name after the recipe, so Nellie Ray or Christina D. Kern (or both, if the page carries two entries) may well belong here rather than being bleed-through; the trailing "6 Spanish onions" clearly belongs to an adjacent recipe. The sentence also breaks off mid-clause after "salt and pepper and."
- The hinge is heatThe recipe specifies pouring the dressing over the cabbage "while hot," straight from the pan, which partly wilts the shreds.
- BaconUse a thick-cut or slab bacon if you can, and render it slowly so you get enough fat to carry the vinegar; 4 to 6 slices for a medium head of cabbage.
- Cutting the cabbageThe recipe says only "shredded." Fine ribbons take the hot dressing evenly.
- BalanceMany hot bacon-and-vinegar slaws include a spoonful of sugar to cut the acid; this recipe calls for none. Add it to taste if the dressing bites.
- Yield and servingOne medium head serves six to eight. Serve warm, soon after dressing — it slumps and weeps if it sits.
Hot slaw dressed with bacon fat and vinegar is the same idea as German Speckkraut and the wilted-lettuce dishes of the same kitchens, and it is associated with German and Pennsylvania Dutch cooking in the American Midwest. The word is generally traced to Dutch koolsla, cabbage salad, which English speakers rendered as "cold slaw" — hence the odd title on a dish served hot, and hence the later "hot slaw" once "cole" was read as "cold." This is the standard account, though the sound-alike explanation is hard to document in detail.