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Cabbage Salad (C olives pint cream Mix)
8 C chopped cabbage 1/2 C sweet relish 1/2 C olives 1/2 pint cream Mix the chopped cabbage, sweet relish and olives. Put in enough salad dressing to thicken. Whip the cream and add to the mixture. Lillian Casey.
The printed ingredient list has clearly lost a line or two — the cabbage and relish quantities never made it to the page — so this is a proportion sketch rather than a recipe. It still works if you treat the cream and olives as the fixed points.
- The missing quantitiesOnly the olives (1/2 cup) and cream (1/2 pint, i.e. 1 cup) are given. Half a pint of whipped cream will lighten roughly a medium head of shredded cabbage, about 8 cups packed; scale the sweet relish to taste, starting at 1/2 cup.
- What the salad dressing meansIn community cookbooks of this general period "salad dressing" often meant boiled dressing -- a cooked custard of egg, vinegar, sugar, mustard and flour -- rather than oil-based mayonnaise, though the page gives no way to be sure which was meant here. Bottled mayonnaise thinned with a little cider vinegar and a pinch of dry mustard gets close; commercial "salad dressing" of the Miracle Whip type is closer still.
- CreamHalf a pint is one cup of heavy cream, which whips to about two cups. Whip to soft peaks only; stiff cream breaks into grains when it is stirred through wet cabbage.
- Fold, do not mixThe order in the original matters. Dress the cabbage first, then fold the whipped cream in last with a spatula. Beating it in collapses the cream and you get a thin, weeping slaw.
- Salt the cabbage firstShredded cabbage sheds water into any dressing. Tossing it with a teaspoon of salt, resting 20 minutes and squeezing it dry keeps the cream from thinning within the hour.
- OlivesChop them coarsely; pimiento-stuffed green olives are a reasonable choice, though the recipe does not specify a type. They and the sweet relish carry most of the salt and acid in the dish, so taste before adding more salt.
- Timing and yieldNo yield can be derived from the page as printed; built to the proportions suggested above it would serve roughly 8 to 10 as a side. Assemble within an hour of serving -- the cream loses its body and the cabbage waters out if it stands longer, and it does not keep to a second day.
Church and community cookbooks of this era sometimes filed cabbage salads among pickles and relishes rather than among salads, which suggests how the dish was understood: a sharp, sweet accompaniment to a heavy plate rather than a course of its own. The whipped cream is the period signature. Before refrigerated bottled mayonnaise became a pantry staple, cooks softened boiled dressing — a vinegary, mustard-hot cooked sauce — by folding whipped cream into it, producing something richer and much milder than either component alone. Recipes like this one, credited to a single member of the congregation and printed with whatever quantities she happened to write down, are typical of the fundraising cookbook as a form: they were reminders for cooks who already knew the dish, not instructions for strangers, which is why half the ingredient list can go missing without anyone at the time noticing.