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Cabbage Salad, No. 1
One small cabbage, four stalks of celery, one pint of mayonnaise dressing, parsley.
Shred the cabbage; add the celery, which has been cut into dice. Place in a salad bowl and pour over it the mayonnaise dressing. Garnish with parsley.
A four-ingredient slaw that depends entirely on the cabbage being cut fine and the dressing being good. The proportions as written are generous with the mayonnaise.
- A pint of mayonnaiseThat is two cups, which will drown a small cabbage into soup. Start with about half a cup, toss, and add more only until the shreds are coated.
- "One small cabbage"Probably a head of a pound or so, giving something like 5 to 7 cups shredded. The recipe does not say which variety; a firm green or white cabbage suits it best, as savoy is looser and red will bleed into the dressing.
- ShreddingQuarter the head, cut out the core, and slice across the grain as thin as you can manage — a mandoline or the slicing disc of a food processor beats a knife here. Coarse shreds stay stubbornly raw-tasting under mayonnaise.
- Draining the cabbageCabbage sheds water once dressed. Tossing the shreds with a teaspoon of salt, letting them sit 20 minutes and squeezing them dry keeps the salad from going watery within the hour.
- Celery cut into diceFour stalks means four ribs from the head, not four whole heads — about a cup diced. Strip the outer strings from the coarser ribs with a peeler.
- Mayonnaise dressingThe dressing of this period would have been made with raw yolk and beaten by hand or with an egg beater. Commercial mayonnaise, made with pasteurised egg and thinned with a spoonful of vinegar or lemon juice, does the same job and keeps far longer.
- TimingDress no more than 30 minutes ahead and keep it cold. Left overnight the celery goes limp and the dressing separates.
- YieldServes six as a side. The parsley garnish is a sprig or a light shower of chopped leaves, not a component.
Cabbage dressed with a rich sauce is a long-standing salad in English and American cookery, and English "cole slaw" is generally traced to the Dutch koolsla (kool, cabbage, plus sla, salad), a borrowing usually associated with the Dutch-settled areas of New York and Pennsylvania. Books of this kind tended to number their variations: a plain cabbage salad first, then the same base with apple, nuts, peppers or boiled dressing. Celery was a common partner, supplying crispness against the soft dressed cabbage.