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Celery and Cabbage Salad
Remove outside leaves from a small solid white cabbage, and cut off stalk close to leaves. Cut out centre, and with a sharp knife shred finely. Let stand one hour in cold or ice water. Drain, wring in double cheese-cloth, to make as dry as possible. Mix with equal parts celery cut in small pieces. Moisten with Cream Dressing and refill cabbage. Arrange on a folded napkin and garnish with celery tips and parsley between folds of napkin and around top of cabbage.
A slaw served in its own hollowed-out cabbage. The technique is sound; only the dressing and the presentation need translating.
- The hinge: get the cabbage dryThe hour in ice water crisps the shreds, but any water left behind will thin the dressing into a puddle. Wringing in doubled cheesecloth works as well now as it did then; a salad spinner followed by a press between towels does the same job.
- Cream DressingThis refers to a separate dressing recipe elsewhere in the same book, not simply whipped cream. Period cream dressings varied: some were cooked and egg-thickened, finished with cream and vinegar; others were an uncooked mixture of cream, vinegar, sugar and salt. A boiled-style dressing, or a thick, slightly sharp mayonnaise thinned with cream, is a reasonable modern stand-in.
- Cutting the shell"Cut out centre" means hollowing the head into a bowl while leaving the outer wall intact, roughly half an inch thick. Slice the base flat first so it sits without rocking, and shred what you scoop out.
- Cabbage choiceA small solid white cabbage means a tight green head of about 1 1/2 to 2 lb. Savoy is too loose to hold a filling, and red cabbage will bleed into a pale dressing.
- CeleryEqual parts of shredded cabbage and diced celery; the recipe does not say whether by weight or volume, and volume is the easier reading. Use the inner ribs; the outer ones are stringy enough to need peeling.
- Dress at the last minuteSalt in the dressing pulls water out of raw cabbage within twenty minutes or so. Combine, fill, and serve rather than assembling ahead.
- The napkinServing cold dishes on a folded linen napkin was a common presentation in cookbooks of this period, decorative as much as anything. A shallow bowl or a bed of greens serves the same purpose without laundry.
- YieldOnly the scooped-out centre is shredded, the shell being kept as the serving vessel; from a 2 lb head, with an equal measure of celery, that gives roughly six to eight side servings.
Cabbage and celery were the two vegetables an American household could reliably keep crisp through winter, celery in damp sand in the cellar and cabbage in the root cellar or buried in straw, which may well be part of why a salad of the two turns up so often in cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s when lettuce was a summer luxury. The recipe seems to belong to a period when celery was shifting from an expensive novelty displayed upright in cut-glass vases to an everyday staple, and it uses the vegetable both ways at once: chopped into the salad and stood up as garnish. Serving a filling back inside its own hollowed shell was a general habit of the period, applied to tomatoes, peppers, oranges and cabbages alike, and suggests a domestic-science ideal in which a plain cold vegetable dish still had to be composed and presented rather than simply spooned into a bowl.