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Cream Slaw
Into a saucepan put ½ of a tablespoonful of butter, 2 tablespoonfuls of sugar and 1 cupful of vinegar and heat to the boiling point. Rub I level teaspoonful of flour to a paste with 2 tablespoonfuls of sour cream, add I beaten egg and 6 tablespoonfuls more of the sour cream. Pour over this carefully the hot vinegar mixture and return to the fire, stirring until thickened. Strain it over 2 quarts of finely shaved cabbage which has previously been seasoned with 1/2 teaspoonful of salt and 1/4 teaspoonful of pepper.
A cooked sour-cream dressing of the kind that preceded bottled mayonnaise in Midwestern and Pennsylvania German kitchens. The whole dish turns on how you handle the egg.
- The hinge: temper, then thicken gentlyPour the hot vinegar into the cream-and-egg mixture in a thin stream while whisking, not the other way round, and keep the pan over low heat. Take it off as soon as it coats the spoon, around 170-175F; boiling it will scramble the egg and no amount of straining will save the texture.
- Sour creamAt the time this was written this meant sweet cream left to sour naturally. Modern cultured sour cream works directly, and full-fat is worth using — light versions often have added starch and can thin out when heated.
- VinegarA full cup of vinegar (assuming a standard 5 percent) against 2 tablespoons of sugar is bracing by current taste. Cider vinegar suits the dish better than distilled white to a modern palate, and you may want to start with three-quarters of a cup.
- Cabbage quantityTwo quarts of finely shaved cabbage is roughly 1 to 1½ lb, about one medium head. Shave it as thin as you can manage; the dressing is thin enough that coarse cuts sit in it rather than take it up.
- Why strainStraining catches any set egg and flour lumps. Do it while the dressing is hot, straight onto the salted cabbage, and toss at once so the leaves wilt slightly.
- Salt the cabbage firstThe instruction to season the cabbage before dressing it is deliberate — the ½ teaspoon salt draws a little water out and seasons the leaves themselves, which the dressing alone will not do.
- Yield and servingServes 8 to 10 as a side. It is better after an hour in the refrigerator and keeps a day or two, though the cabbage softens and gives up liquid.
Cooked or "boiled" dressings like this one were common for coleslaw in nineteenth-century America, before commercial mayonnaise reached grocery shelves in the 1910s. They used what a household already had — vinegar, an egg, a spoonful of flour, and whatever cream had turned in the pantry — and the sweet-sour balance is of a piece with the German-American cooking of Pennsylvania and the Midwest, where hot vinegar dressings were poured over cabbage, potatoes and dandelion greens alike. Cabbage stored for months in a cellar, the dressing cost pennies, and the recipe turned soured cream into an asset rather than waste.