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Cabbage Salad. No. 2
Cabbage, hard-boiled eggs, parsley, olives, salad dressing. Shred the cabbage; place in a sauce pan and pour boiling water over it, and add a little salt. Let it stand for half an hour; wash in cold water and dry thoroughly; place in a salad bowl and garnish with hard-boiled eggs, parsley and olives. Serve with plain salad dressing.
A quantity-free recipe of the kind common in turn-of-the-century salad books, where the cook was expected to supply proportions. The only real technique here is the hot-water treatment of the cabbage.
- The blanch is the hingeThe cabbage is not cooked — it stands in off-boil water for half an hour to soften the sulphurous bite and wilt it slightly, then is refreshed in cold water. If you leave it much longer, or use water at a hard boil in a heated pan, it goes limp and grey.
- Dry it properly"Dry thoroughly" is doing real work: wet cabbage will not hold dressing and will dilute it into a puddle at the bottom of the bowl. A salad spinner or a clean towel, then a spell in the refrigerator to crisp.
- "Sauce pan" here means vessel onlyThe pan is a container for the soaking, not something set over heat. Any non-reactive bowl will do.
- Plain salad dressingIn books of this period "plain" dressing usually means a simple oil-and-vinegar French dressing, salt and pepper, as opposed to a mayonnaise or a cooked boiled dressing; the proportions given vary from book to book, with something in the region of three parts oil to one of vinegar being common. Bottled "salad dressing" in the modern sweet-and-tangy sense is not what is meant.
- OlivesAssume green olives in brine, stoned and halved or sliced. They and the eggs supply most of the salt and richness, so go easy on salting the dressing.
- Proportions and yieldThe recipe gives none, so these are a modern suggestion only: a head of cabbage of a pound or so shredded fine, with three hard-boiled eggs and a handful of olives, will dress four to six as a side salad.
- Assembly orderThe cabbage goes into the bowl and the eggs, parsley and olives are arranged on top; the dressing is served with the salad rather than tossed through it beforehand. The garnish is meant to be seen.
Cabbage was the year-round salad vegetable of the northern American kitchen — cheap, storable through winter in a cellar, and available long after lettuce had gone. This collection, sold in the era when the composed salad was becoming a fixture of the middle-class table, runs several numbered cabbage variants, and it is often said that such repetition reflects how ordinary the ingredient was: the cook needed ideas for dressing it up. The scalding-and-refreshing step belongs to an older tradition of taming strong vegetables with hot water before serving them cold, and the garnish of hard-boiled egg, parsley and olives is the standard decorative vocabulary of the period, appearing on everything from potato salad to cold salmon. The absence of quantities is characteristic, and has generally been read as a sign that the reader was expected to know already how to make a dressing and to need only the combination.