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Cabbage Hot Slaw
Chop the cabbage fine after soaking it one hour in cold water; then place it in an iron kettle with a cup of vinegar. Cover the kettle and set it where the cabbage will slowly stew for two hours, stirring often, and adding a little more vinegar as that in the kettle evaporates, but keeping only enough moisture in the kettle to prevent the cabbage from burning. Should the vinegar be very strong, weaken it with a little water. When the cabbage is tender, add a little butter, salt and pepper, and serve hot. The slaw, when cooked, should be of a delicate pinkish shade. It requires constant attention while cooking.
A long, slow braise of cabbage in vinegar, from the era when a covered kettle at the back of the range did the work. It translates directly to a heavy pan on low heat, with two adjustments worth making.
- The pan matters more than the recipe admitsBare cast iron plus two hours of vinegar will pick up metallic flavor and dull the color. Use enameled cast iron or a heavy stainless pan; the weight is what you want, not the reactive surface.
- Which cabbageThe "delicate pinkish shade" points to red cabbage, whose anthocyanins turn bright pink-red in acid. Green cabbage cooked this way goes drab olive-brown and tastes the same but looks nothing like the description.
- Cut it after drainingSoaking a whole quarter for an hour in cold water crisps it; shredding first just leaches out flavor. Shred fine, about 1/8 inch, and shake dry before it goes in the pan.
- Two hours is generousCabbage sold today is often tenderer than a winter storage head would have been. Start checking at 40 minutes; many heads are done in an hour, and the acid helps keep the shreds from collapsing entirely.
- Vinegar strengthThe recipe's own instruction to weaken very strong vinegar shows household vinegar varied; most bottled cider or white vinegar today runs around 5 percent acidity, which is on the strong side for this. Begin with a cup diluted half and half with water and add plain water as it cooks down.
- Constant attention means constant attentionThe pan is meant to run nearly dry by the end. Stir every ten minutes and keep just a film of liquid under the cabbage, or the sugars scorch and the whole batch turns bitter.
- Seasoning at the endButter, salt and pepper go in off the heat. A teaspoon or two of sugar is a common period addition and rounds off vinegar that has concentrated more than you meant it to.
- YieldA medium head, about 2 lb, cooks down to roughly four side servings. Serve it hot alongside pork, sausage or roast goose.
Hot slaw is the cooked cousin of cold slaw, and both names go back to the Dutch koolsla, cabbage salad, which entered American English through Dutch-settled New York and was reanalyzed as "cold slaw" -- from which "hot slaw" and "warm slaw" followed by contrast; the now-standard "cole slaw" reflects cole, an older English word for cabbage. Sweet-sour braised cabbage of this kind is most associated with German and Pennsylvania Dutch kitchens, where it accompanied pork in every form, and it appears in general American cookbooks over the second half of the nineteenth century. Its appearance here is characteristic of The Butterick Cook Book, published by the dress-pattern firm for the same middle-class housekeepers who bought its magazines: a cheap winter vegetable, a long cooking time on a range that was already lit, and a result showy enough to put on the table.