Hot Slaw
3 quarts of finely shred cabbage. 1 pint of vinegar. 1/2 pint of water. 8 or 10 raw yolks of eggs. 1 pod of red pepper, minced. 8 ounces of butter. 1 tablespoonful of salt.
Put the cabbage in a bright sink of the steam chest, or, otherwise, in a bright saucepan placed in another of boiling water. Beat the yolks in the vinegar and water till well mixed then add them and the butter and salt and pepper to the cabbage. Stir and turn over the cabbage frequently till the sauce thickens and becomes like cream. It ought not to boil more than a minute.
The foregoing dish stands alone. It is a class by itself. It cannot go under the head of salads but must take a place among the vegetables. But it is a general favorite. There is a popular usage of calling all cooked green vegetables salads as well as garden sauce; and there is foreign authority, though not very "hefty," for styling all hot vegetables that have a vinegar dressing, like our stewed beets with sour butter sauce, en salade. But these are not dictionary definitions. The line must be drawn somewhere. All salads are cold.
Here is a place where greens are called salad. It is from Beverley's History of Virginia, and quoted by Thoreau: "The Jamestown weed or thorn-apple, being an early plant, was gathered very young for a boiled salad, by some of the soldiers sent to Virginia to quell the rebellion of Bacon; and some of them ate plentifully of it, the effect of which was a very pleasant comedy, for they turned natural fools upon it for several days: one would blow up a feather in the air; another would dart straws at it with much fury; and another was sitting up in a corner like a monkey, grinning and making mouths at them; a fourth would fondly kiss and paw his companions, and sneer in their faces, with a countenance more antic than any Dutch droll. A thousand such simple tricks they played, and after eleven days returned to themselves again, not remembering anything that had passed." It was right, of course, for them to boil greens when they went to quell bacon, gammon and spinach always go together; but ought not the properties of "Jimson weed" be thoroughly inquired into? People in hotels often act with extreme foolishness, but landlords never think of investigating whether there wasn't some "Jimson" in the greens boiled for dinner. The proper definitions divide salads in two classes, the artificial, elaborate, compounded and peculiar like those just passed along, and the spontaneous, natural and universal, the dinner of herbs and peace, like these remaining. These salads come in favor about the time the people who can are packing their trunks and discussing the merits and demerits of the different summer resorts. `O, what is so rare as a day in June?" --Sir Launfal. "When daisies pied, and violets blue, And lady-smacks all silver-white, And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue Do paint the meadows with delight." --Love's Laboure
A hot cabbage dish dressed with an egg-yolk and vinegar sauce, essentially a boiled dressing made directly on the vegetable. It is a hotel-scale quantity written for a steam table, and it scales down cleanly.
- The hinge: keep it under a boilThe hinge: keep it below a hard boil -- ten yolks in an acidic liquid can set into scrambled curds if the mixture boils hard, though the recipe itself allows up to a minute of boiling. Hold it over simmering water and pull it as soon as it coats the spoon like thin cream, around 175-180F.
- "Bright sink of the steam chest"Most likely a hotel steam table insert. At home this is a double boiler or a metal bowl over a pan of simmering water, which is exactly what the second half of the sentence describes. "Bright" probably refers to clean tinned or polished metal; use stainless, not bare aluminum or unlined copper, since a pint of vinegar will pick up metal from both.
- ScaleThree quarts of finely shredded cabbage is roughly a 2 1/2 to 3 lb head, and the full recipe would serve ten or so as a side. Quartered it comes to about 3 cups cabbage, 1/2 cup vinegar, 1/4 cup water, 2 to 3 yolks, 2 oz butter, and a scant teaspoon of salt.
- "1 pod of red pepper"A single dried cayenne or similar hot pod, minced whole with its seeds. Heat varies enormously between pods; 1/2 to 1 teaspoon of crushed dried chile in the full batch is the same order of magnitude.
- Vinegar strengthA pint of vinegar to half a pint of water is aggressive by modern palates, and period cider vinegar was not standardized. Taste the diluted vinegar before you commit the yolks, and add water if it is harsh.
- The cabbage barely cooksNothing here tells you to soften the cabbage first. It goes into the vessel raw and warms through as the sauce thickens, so shred it fine on a mandoline or with a knife; a coarse chop will stay stubbornly crunchy and cold in the middle.
- About the jimsonweed passageThe long quotation from Beverley is a digression, not an instruction. Datura stramonium is a genuinely poisonous plant with anticholinergic alkaloids in every part, and the "pleasant comedy" described was a serious poisoning. It is not a boiling green.
- ServingServe immediately and warm. The sauce is a thickened yolk sauce and may tighten or separate if it sits on a steam table or goes into the refrigerator; it does not reheat well.
Hot slaw is the cooked half of a pair with cold slaw, both from the Dutch koolsla, cabbage salad, a word that arrived in American English through Dutch-settled New York and was long folk-etymologized into "cold slaw" and then, by symmetry, "hot slaw." The dressing is a boiled dressing in the American nineteenth-century manner: egg yolks, vinegar and butter thickened over water, a common answer in a period when oil was expensive, often rancid, and mayonnaise was a restaurant luxury rather than a pantry staple. The book is often attributed to Jessup Whitehead, written out of Chicago hotel kitchens, though the page itself does not establish it; that attribution would explain the steam chest, the three-quart batch, and the author's willingness to spend far more words defending the dish's classification as vegetable rather than salad than he spends telling you how to make it. That taxonomic fussiness was of its moment: menus of the 1880s were printed in French-influenced courses, and where a hot vinegared cabbage belonged in that scheme was a live question for a man writing bills of fare.