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Sour Cream Cabbage
East Orange, N. J.
Shred cabbage, add ice and let stand. Chop good sized onion. Drain cabbage and add onion, 12 bowl of fresh sour cream, 2T sugar. Add salt and pepper and about 4 T vinegar. Mix well and pour over cabbage. Luella Ray.
A church-supper slaw, written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you already knew the dish. Two of its measurements need interpretation before you start.
- The "12 bowl" of creamMost likely a typesetting slip for 1/2 bowl, though there is no way to know what size bowl the cook had in mind. Start with something under a cup of sour cream for a medium head of cabbage and add it by feel until the shreds are coated rather than swimming.
- T means tablespoonCapital T is conventionally a tablespoon in books of this kind, so 2 tablespoons sugar and about 4 tablespoons vinegar — a sharp, sweet-sour dressing.
- "Fresh sour cream"In this period the phrase generally meant sweet cream that had soured naturally, thick and tangy and unpasteurised, rather than a cultured product. Use commercial cultured sour cream; full-fat holds up to the vinegar without breaking, while light versions can go watery.
- The ice step is the pointShredded cabbage buried in ice for 30 to 60 minutes turns crisp and loses its sulphurous edge. Drain it hard afterwards — press it in a colander or spin it — or the melted ice will thin the dressing into soup.
- Onion quantityA "good sized onion" raw is assertive by modern taste. A small yellow or sweet onion, finely chopped, or half a red onion rinsed in cold water, sits better with the cream.
- Mixing orderThe instruction reads backwards: combine the cream, sugar, vinegar, salt and pepper into a dressing first, then pour it over the drained cabbage and onion. Add vinegar in stages and taste, since sour creams vary in acidity.
- Resting and yieldHalf an hour in the refrigerator lets the sugar and salt draw out a little cabbage liquid and marry the flavours; beyond a few hours it slackens. One medium head serves six to eight as a side.
Sour cream slaw belongs to the northern European end of the American cabbage tradition, in which cabbage was dressed with soured cream and vinegar rather than with boiled dressing or mayonnaise. The ice treatment was standard advice in turn-of-the-century American cookery for any raw salad vegetable, in kitchens where an icebox meant a literal block of ice you could break a handful from. That this contribution carries a place name, East Orange, New Jersey, is characteristic of community cookbooks of the era, though whether such a name marks the dish's origin or simply the contributor's address is not always clear. The vegetable sections of fundraising cookbooks like this one are a fair record of what actually reached the table rather than what the magazines were recommending.