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Cole-Slaw
¼ cup vinegar
3 eggs
1½ teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon butter
¼ teaspoon pepper
2 tablespoons cream
1 tablespoon sugar
3 cups cabbage
Heat vinegar and seasonings (including the sugar and butter) to boiling, beat eggs and add hot vinegar mixture to them very slowly. Cook in double boiler until the mixture thickens and then add cream. Remove the dressing from the fire and pour it while hot over the cabbage. Garnish with rings of hard-cooked eggs and serve when cold.
This is a boiled-dressing slaw rather than a mayonnaise one: the eggs are cooked into a custard with hot vinegar, which gives a tangy, faintly sweet coating that softens the cabbage as it cools.
- The hinge: temper slowlyAdding the boiling vinegar to the beaten eggs in a thin stream, whisking constantly, is the whole recipe. Dump it in and the eggs scramble.
- Keep the double boiler gentleWater at a bare simmer, not a rolling boil, and stir without stopping. The dressing is done when it coats a spoon, around 170-175F; past that the egg proteins tighten and the mixture breaks.
- Cabbage cutThree cups of shredded cabbage is roughly half a small head, about 8 oz. Shred it finely on a mandoline or with a sharp knife so the hot dressing wilts it evenly.
- "Cream"Here this means heavy or table cream, not sour cream. Heavy cream works; the recipe has it stirred in at the end of the cooking, before the dressing comes off the fire.
- Vinegar strengthVinegar strength varied more than today's standardized 5 percent. Taste the finished dressing and slacken it with a spoonful of water if it bites too hard.
- Salvage a curdled batchIf the custard goes grainy, push it through a fine sieve while still warm and whisk in the cream. It will be thinner but usable.
- Yield and servingServes four as a side. It must go cold before serving, and it improves after an hour or two in the refrigerator as the cabbage takes up the dressing; eat within two days, as egg dressings do not keep.
- GarnishRings of hard-cooked egg means slices cut crosswise from a whole egg, laid over the top just before it goes to the table.
Boiled dressing of this kind was the workaday American salad sauce before jarred mayonnaise became common: it uses whole eggs rather than yolks alone and needs no oil. The name is generally traced to the Dutch koolsalade, cabbage salad, and was long written "cold slaw," often said to be a later reanalysis of the unfamiliar word. The Butterick book, published by a pattern company for a readership of home sewers and housekeepers, favors exactly this sort of thrifty recipe, built on cabbage, a little sugar and a spoonful of cream rather than a cupful of oil.