Cold Slaw
1 White Cabbage (small) 1 Tablespoon Oil 4 Tablespoons Vinegar 1 Teaspoon Mustard Salt, Sugar, Pepper 3 Tablespoons Minced Celery Shred the cabbage. Prepare a dressing from the other ingredients and toss up well. Serve in a glass bowl.
A vinegar slaw rather than a creamy one, and the proportions are lean by modern habit: four parts vinegar to one of oil. A few notes before you shred.
- The mustardIn a book of this vintage "1 teaspoon mustard" most likely means dry mustard powder rather than prepared jarred mustard, though the recipe does not say. Whisk it into the vinegar first so it dissolves and loses its raw edge; prepared mustard will work but makes a blunter dressing.
- Salt, sugar, pepperThe original leaves these to taste, which is honest rather than careless. Start with about half a teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of sugar and a few grinds of pepper for a small head, then correct after the cabbage has sat a few minutes and drawn water.
- The vinegarHousehold vinegar of this period was often cider vinegar and may well have been weaker than today's standardised 5 percent. Four tablespoons of modern distilled white vinegar against one of oil will be sharp; cider vinegar, or cutting one tablespoon of the vinegar with water, gets closer to the intended balance.
- Size of a small cabbageRoughly 1 to 1.5 lb, yielding about four to six cups shredded. That serves four to six as a side. Shred fine, or the thin dressing will not coat it.
- Let it standThe instruction stops at "toss up well," but salted cabbage needs fifteen to thirty minutes to soften and release liquid. Toss again before serving and taste once more, since the salt will have spread and the dressing thinned.
- The celeryThree tablespoons minced celery is a small amount and meant as seasoning, not bulk. Use the tender inner stalks and their leaves; celery seed, about a quarter teaspoon, was a common stand-in and works here.
- The glass bowlGlass is practical as well as decorative: vinegar dressings can react with tinned and silver-plated ware, so a non-reactive bowl is the sensible choice today too.
"Cold slaw" is an English reworking of the Dutch koolsla, cabbage salad, carried into American kitchens by Dutch settlers and generally traced through New York cookery. The reinterpretation took hold firmly enough that nineteenth-century books also print "hot slaw" for the wilted version, as though cold and hot were the real distinction rather than a garbled vowel. What separates this recipe from the supermarket slaw of today is the dressing: boiled and mayonnaise-type dressings existed alongside it, but a plain oil-and-vinegar toss was the cheaper form. That it appears in a bride's cook book is telling. A new housekeeper needed a salad that required no cooking and no eggs, and cabbage was inexpensive and kept well through much of the year.