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Red Cabbage and Celery Salad
Procure a firm, close, red cabbage, trim off all the outside leaves, cut into four pieces, washing in plenty of water, and drain; break the leaves apart, remove the stalks and ribs, and cut the rest into shreds. The heart and white sticks of two heads of celery should be cut into pieces, and mixed with the cabbage in a salad-bowl, garnish the salad with young green tops of celery, and serve with a dressing poured over it, which is prepared as follows: Beat one egg and mix in gradually a tablespoonful of salad oil, a tablespoonful of vinegar, and a half teaspoonful of caster sugar and dry mustard. Season with a little salt.
A plain slaw of shredded red cabbage and celery under a single-egg dressing. The dressing is the part that needs attention: it is an emulsion, and the order of addition matters more than the recipe lets on.
- Caster sugarSuperfine sugar, finer than granulated and coarser than powdered. Granulated works here since the dressing is whisked, not creamed.
- Salad oilIn late nineteenth-century American cookbooks this usually meant olive oil, or increasingly cottonseed oil. Either a mild olive oil or a neutral oil suits; a strong extra-virgin will dominate a dressing this small.
- Build the emulsion slowlyAdd the oil gradually rather than all at once, and whisk in the vinegar only after the oil is incorporated. With a whole egg to just one tablespoon of oil there is plenty of yolk to carry it, so this is insurance rather than a difficult emulsion.
- Raw eggThe dressing is never heated. Use a pasteurized egg, or pasteurized liquid egg, if serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised.
- Quantities are leanOne egg with a tablespoon each of oil and vinegar makes only about a quarter to a third of a cup of dressing, which will barely coat a whole cabbage and the hearts of two heads of celery. Expect to multiply it, or reduce the vegetables.
- Shred fine, then saltRed cabbage cut coarsely stays tough and squeaky. Cut it as thin as you can manage, and if you have time, toss the shreds with a little salt for 20 minutes and drain before dressing them.
- ColourVinegar keeps red cabbage bright magenta; any alkaline contact turns it blue-grey. Dress it shortly before serving and use a glass or china bowl rather than bare metal.
- YieldAs written the vegetables serve eight to ten as a side salad.
Red cabbage dressed with vinegar has a long life in northern European cooking, where the acid was valued as much for holding the colour as for the flavour, and it is often said to have reached American tables through German and Dutch households. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he was ma"tre d'h"tel of the Waldorf, is thick with salads of this kind: cheap, cold, cut fine, and finished with a made dressing rather than plain oil and vinegar. The single-egg dressing here is essentially a small mayonnaise loosened with vinegar and sharpened with mustard, the same family of dressing that carries the hotel's more famous apple-and-celery salad. Celery itself was still something of a luxury vegetable in the 1890s, sold by the head and often set out raw in tall glasses on the table, which may have some bearing on the care taken here to use the pale heart and the green tops for garnish.