Cold Slaw
Cut very fine, one pound of young green cabbage on a cucumber slicer, also one Spanish onion; add three tablespoonfuls of Pompeian Olive Oil, three tablespoonfuls of vinegar, and pour over cabbage and onion; add some chopped chives or parsley, salt and pepper; mix well and serve on lettuce or watercress when cold.
In selecting a table oil, let quality rather than price be your guide.
A plain oil-and-vinegar slaw with no mayonnaise and no sugar, which makes the quality of the two liquids the whole dish. A few notes on quantities and technique.
- YieldOne pound of cabbage dressed this way serves about four as a side, or six if it is piled on lettuce as directed.
- Cucumber slicerThis means the flat wooden or tin slicing board with a fixed blade, the ancestor of the mandoline. A mandoline on its thinnest setting, or the slicing disc of a food processor, gives the same near-translucent shred. A knife works but produces a coarser, wetter slaw.
- Spanish onionA whole Spanish onion to a pound of cabbage is aggressive by current taste. Spanish onions were sold large and mild; use half a large sweet onion, sliced as thin as the cabbage, and rinse it in cold water if it is sharp.
- Three and threeEqual oil and vinegar is a much sharper ratio than the three-to-one common now. It suits the sweetness of young cabbage, but taste the vinegar first — vinegar strength was not standardised in this period and varied a good deal from today's 5 percent.
- The hinge: salt timingSalt the cabbage last, immediately before serving, or dress and salt it and then leave it a full hour and drain the liquid off. Salting early and serving straight away gives a slaw that goes limp and watery in the bowl.
- Serve when coldThe instruction matters: chill the dressed slaw thoroughly, then set it on lettuce or watercress at the last moment so the greens stay crisp and do not wilt into the vinegar.
- Young green cabbageA loose spring or savoy-type head, not a dense white winter cabbage. If only firm white cabbage is available, shred it finer still and give it the resting-and-draining treatment above.
This is a booklet recipe from an olive oil company, and the closing line — "let quality rather than price be your guide" — is the advertisement showing through; such branded pamphlets were a major channel for spreading olive oil into American home cooking in the early twentieth century, when it was still sold in drugstores as a medicinal item. "Cold slaw" is the older English spelling of the dish, generally traced to Dutch koolsalade or koolsla, literally cabbage salad, which English speakers heard as "cold slaw" and later re-analysed into "coleslaw"; both spellings ran side by side in American cookbooks through the nineteenth century. The dressing here is the plain oil-and-vinegar sort that predates the mayonnaise-bound slaw now assumed to be standard, and it shows the dish in its older guise: a vinegared salad rather than a creamy one.