Cabbage Salad (Head cabbage shredded fine)

A church-supper slaw with a cooked vinegar dressing, typical of mid-century Midwestern community cookbooks. The typography has suffered in transcription, and the fractions need reading with a little judgment.

• The mangled fractionsFraction bars appear to have dropped out in transcription. Read the list as 1½ heads cabbage, 12 marshmallows, 1 tablespoon flour, 5 tablespoons sugar, ¼ teaspoon mustard, ½ teaspoon salt, and 1 teaspoon sugar over the cabbage. The parenthetical "(2½ vinegar 1½ water)" cannot be resolved with confidence; it appears to give proportions for the 1 cup of liquid.
• The vinegar note"Add 1 C vinegar (2½ vinegar 1½ water)" most likely indicates that the cup is diluted rather than straight vinegar; on that reading it works out to roughly ⅝ cup vinegar to ⅜ cup water. Taste before committing the whole cup.
• The stray line"1 can Peas" sits at the end with no instruction and belongs to no step. It is either a partial ingredient list bleeding in from the neighboring recipe or an optional addition; a drained can of peas folded in would not be out of character for the genre, but the recipe as written does not use it.
• Two cooks, one pageThe page carries two names, Ruth A. Willers and Mrs. Chas. Greenwood, with the first falling after the salad ingredients and the second after the dressing; whether these are one recipe from two hands or two entries run together cannot be told from the page. Read as one dish: salt-and-sugar the cabbage, cut the marshmallows in squares, dice the pineapple, and dress it all when the dressing is cold.
• Cooking the dressingThis is a boiled dressing, not mayonnaise. Whisk flour, sugar, mustard and salt together dry, whisk in the diluted vinegar, then the beaten egg, and cook over low heat or a double boiler, stirring constantly, until it coats a spoon — about 5 to 8 minutes. Direct high heat will scramble the egg into threads.
• Salt the cabbage brieflyThe recipe scatters a pinch of salt and a teaspoon of sugar over the cabbage before dressing, but gives no standing time and no instruction to drain. If liquid gathers, pour it off before dressing.
• Marshmallows"Cut into squares" appears to refer to the twelve marshmallows rather than to the sugar line it follows. Quartering modern large marshmallows gives pieces of a workable size.
• Yield and timingThe recipe gives no yield or chilling time; 1½ heads of cabbage makes a large bowl, enough for a crowd. "When cold add to cabbage mixture and chill" is the only timing instruction.