Home › Salads › Cold-Slaw Dressing
Cold-Slaw Dressing
2 eggs 1 cup vinegar 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon sugar 1/2 tablespoon butter Beat the eggs thoroughly; add the other ingredients and cook all over boiling water until the mixture thickens.
A boiled dressing of the sort that preceded bottled mayonnaise in American kitchens: eggs thickened over water with vinegar, no oil at all. The whole thing hinges on gentle heat.
- Cook it over water, not on the burnerSet a bowl or the top of a double boiler over simmering water and keep the base clear of the water itself. Direct heat will scramble the eggs into curds before the mixture ever thickens.
- What "thickens" looks likeEggs set around 160-180F, and the acid here helps them coagulate a little sooner. Stir constantly and pull it off when it coats a spoon; it will keep tightening as it cools.
- Vinegar strengthA full cup of modern 5 percent distilled vinegar to two eggs is very sharp by current taste. Cider vinegar is usually the same strength but gives a rounder flavor, and the vinegar can be cut with a little water if wanted.
- ButterHalf a tablespoon is about 1 1/2 teaspoons. Stir it in at the end, off the heat, so it emulsifies rather than separates into slicks.
- If it breaksA curdled batch can sometimes be rescued by pushing it through a fine sieve or giving it thirty seconds in a blender while still warm.
- Yield and useRoughly a cup and a half, enough to dress a shredded 2 lb head of cabbage. Pour it on while still slightly warm so it clings, then chill the slaw.
- KeepingRefrigerate in a covered jar and use within about four days. The acidity helps but this is still a cooked egg sauce.
"Cold-slaw" is a folk spelling of coleslaw, which comes from the Dutch koolsla, cabbage salad; English speakers heard the first syllable as "cold," and the spelling with a hyphen persisted in American cookbooks well into the twentieth century. Boiled dressings like this one were the workhorse salad sauce of the period: they used eggs and vinegar, both cheap and always on hand, rather than the quantity of good oil a mayonnaise demands, and they kept better in an era of uncertain refrigeration.