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Cabbage Salad
½ head cabbage
1 teaspoon mustard
6 eggs
2 teaspoons melted butter
½ cup sugar
¼ cup vinegar
1 teaspoon salt
Cut the cabbage in several parts, and wash it well. Remove wilted or tough leaves, cut out the core and chop very fine with a sharp knife. Cook the eggs hard, chop five of them very fine, place the cabbage in a salad-bowl, add the chopped eggs, and toss and fold lightly together. Mix the sugar, salt, mustard and vinegar well together and pour this liquid over the cabbage and eggs. Toss again lightly with a fork held in each hand, arrange in a dish, and garnish with the remaining egg cut in slices.
A plain chopped slaw dressed with a sweet-sour vinegar mixture rather than mayonnaise. The ingredient list and the method do not quite agree, so read both before starting.
- The butter is orphanedTwo teaspoons of melted butter appear in the ingredient list and are never mentioned again. Whisk it into the sugar-salt-mustard-vinegar mixture while the butter is still warm; that is plainly where it belongs, and it softens the sharpness of the raw vinegar.
- What kind of mustardIn an American list of this period, an unqualified teaspoon of mustard most likely means dry mustard powder. Prepared yellow mustard would give a milder, wetter result; if you use it, allow a scant tablespoon.
- Half a head of cabbageReckon on about 1 to 1¼ lb of trimmed green cabbage, roughly 6 to 8 cups once chopped. The recipe wants it chopped fine with a knife rather than shredded long, so the pieces sit evenly with the chopped egg.
- Hard-cooked eggsSix eggs is a great deal of egg for this quantity of cabbage, and it is meant to be: the dish is nearly as much egg salad as slaw. Cover the eggs with cold water, bring to a boil, cover and stand off the heat 10 to 12 minutes, then cool in cold water so the yolks stay yellow.
- The dressing is sweetHalf a cup of sugar to a quarter cup of vinegar is a strong sweet-sour balance by current taste. Mix it, taste it before it goes on the cabbage, and cut the sugar to a third of a cup or less if you want the vinegar to lead.
- Dress it lateSalt and vinegar pull water out of raw cabbage quickly. Toss no more than twenty minutes before serving, or the bowl fills with sweet liquid and the cabbage slumps.
- YieldServes six to eight as a side dish. Leftovers keep a day refrigerated but will be noticeably wetter.
Chopped cabbage in a sweet-sour dressing runs through nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookbooks under a dozen names, and its ancestry is usually traced to the Dutch koolsla, cabbage salad, that gave English the word coleslaw. What marks this version as belonging to its period is the dressing: no mayonnaise, no oil, just sugar, vinegar, dry mustard and a little butter, the same family of boiled and unboiled vinegar dressings that dominated home salad-making before commercial mayonnaise became a pantry staple in the 1910s and 1920s. The heavy hand with hard-cooked eggs is also of its time; eggs were the cheap protein that turned a bowl of raw vegetable into something substantial enough to earn a place at supper. The Butterick company, better known for dress patterns, published household books like this one for the same readership that bought its magazines, and the recipes lean toward the economical and the quickly assembled.