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Cole-Slaw
1/4 cup vinegar 1 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper 1 tablespoon sugar 3 eggs 1 tablespoon butter 2 tablespoons cream 3 cups cabbage Heat vinegar and seasonings (including the sugar and butter) to boiling, beat eggs and add hot vinegar mixture to them very slowly. Cook in double boiler until the mixture thickens and then add cream. Remove the dressing from the fire and pour it while hot over the cabbage. Garnish with rings of hard-cooked eggs and serve when cold.
A boiled dressing rather than a mayonnaise: the eggs do the thickening, and the whole thing lives or dies on keeping them below a scramble. Nothing here needs substituting, only careful heat.
- The hinge: temper slowlyBeat the eggs well, then add the boiling vinegar in a thin stream while whisking constantly. Dumping it in cooks the eggs on contact and no amount of later whisking will smooth out the curds.
- Double boiler heatKeep the water at a bare simmer, not a rolling boil, and do not let the bowl touch the water. The dressing should thicken to a pourable custard well short of a boil; take it off as soon as it coats, since overheating will curdle it.
- If it does curdleA quick blitz with an immersion blender, or pressing it through a fine sieve, will usually pull a slightly grainy dressing back together. A badly scrambled one will not recover.
- Cabbage measureThree cups of shredded cabbage is roughly half a pound, something under a third of a medium head. Shred it fine; coarse chunks will not take up the dressing.
- The garnish eggs are extraThe three eggs in the list all go into the dressing. Hard-cook one or two more for the rings on top.
- CreamPeriod recipes may mean either light or heavy cream here; either will do. It goes in off the heat and mainly softens the vinegar's edge.
- Hot over cold, then chillPouring the dressing on hot wilts the cabbage slightly and helps it absorb the seasoning. Let it come to room temperature, then refrigerate at least an hour before serving; the dressing thickens further as it cools.
- YieldServes about three or four as a side. Best eaten the day it is made, as the cabbage continues to weep.
Boiled dressings like this one were common in American slaw and potato salad before commercial mayonnaise was widely available, and they persisted well after it was. The name is generally traced to Dutch koolsalade, cabbage salad, and nineteenth-century cookbooks spell it variously cold slaw, cole slaw and cole-slaw, with some writers assuming the first word meant "cold." The garnish of hard-cooked egg rings is characteristic of the period's insistence that even a bowl of cabbage be presented as a composed dish.