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Cole-Slaw
Select a small, heavy cabbage, take off outside leaves, and cut in quarters; with a sharp knife slice very thinly. Soak in cold water until crisp, drain, dry between towels, and mix with Cream Salad Dressing.
Barely a recipe by modern standards, but every instruction in it is doing work. The result depends almost entirely on how thin the cabbage is cut and how dry it is when the dressing goes on.
- The hinge: dry the cabbageWater clinging to the shreds thins the dressing into a puddle within minutes. After soaking, spin the cabbage in a salad spinner and then blot it, or roll it in a clean towel as Farmer says; it should feel almost squeaky.
- Cut thinner than you thinkA sharp knife on a quartered, cored wedge gives long fine ribbons. A mandoline set thin does it faster. A food processor shredding disc bruises the cabbage and releases water, which works against the previous point.
- The cold soakTwenty to thirty minutes in ice water is enough to firm limp cabbage and take the raw edge off. It is not a modern refinement that can be skipped — supermarket cabbage that has sat in cold storage benefits from it as much as anything from a nineteenth-century cellar.
- What size cabbage"Small, heavy" means a dense, tightly packed head of roughly 1½ to 2 lb — heavy for its size is the test. A firm green cabbage suits the method best; Savoy is looser and frillier and does not slice as cleanly this way.
- Cream Salad DressingThe cross-reference is to Farmer's cooked dressing: egg, butter, mustard, salt, sugar, vinegar and cream, thickened over hot water and cooled. It is tangy and custard-like, not mayonnaise, and much closer to a boiled-dressing slaw than to a modern mayo-based one. Cook it gently over hot water until it thickens, then chill thoroughly.
- Dress at the last minuteSalt and acid pull water from cabbage steadily. Dress within half an hour of serving; if you need to work ahead, keep the shredded cabbage and the chilled dressing in separate covered bowls in the refrigerator.
- YieldA 2 lb head shredded gives roughly 8 cups, serving six to eight as a side.
The name is Dutch: koolsla, from kool (cabbage) and sla (salad), carried into American English through the Dutch settlements of New York and in print by the late eighteenth century. English speakers who did not know the Dutch heard "cold slaw," which is why nineteenth-century cookbooks so often print that spelling and then, with a certain logic, offer "hot slaw" alongside it — cabbage dressed with a hot vinegar-and-egg sauce. Farmer's version reflects the school-kitchen habit of building recipes from cross-referenced parts: the salad itself is brief because the real work sits under Cream Salad Dressing. Cabbage earned its place in a book like this by being cheap, keeping for months in a cellar, and being one of the very few crisp raw vegetables available in a northern city in February.