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White Cabbage Salad
Procure a tender white cabbage, cut out the stalks and ribs, and place a number of the thinnest leaves together and cut them into narrow strips. Cut two thin rashers of bacon into small squares, place them in a fryingpan and fry them until they commence to color; move the pan off the fire, pour in a cupful each of vinegar and water, seasoning with salt and pepper and again place the pan over the fire, stirring its contents until quite hot. Throw the cabbage lightly into a salad-bowl, and serve, pouring the prepared dressing over it.
A hot bacon dressing poured over raw shredded cabbage — essentially a wilted slaw, and it lives or dies on serving it the moment the dressing comes off the heat.
- The hinge: serve immediatelyThe cabbage is not cooked, only wilted by the hot dressing at the table. Dress it in the bowl and bring it out at once; left to stand, the leaves collapse and weep and the salad turns watery.
- Cut the leaves fineStack the trimmed leaves flat and slice into ribbons no thicker than 1/8 inch. Thick shreds will not soften in the brief contact with the hot liquid, which is why Oscar specifies the thinnest leaves only.
- RashersA rasher is simply a slice of bacon. Two thin slices is roughly 1 to 2 oz; use a dry-cured slab bacon if you can, since much modern supermarket bacon is wet-cured and will steam rather than color.
- Keep the fatThe recipe never says to pour off the drippings, and you should not. The rendered fat is the only richness in the dressing — there is no oil and no egg.
- Off the heat before the vinegarMoving the pan off the fire before adding the liquid is not fussiness. Vinegar hitting screaming-hot bacon fat spits violently and throws off acrid fumes.
- Vinegar strengthA cup of vinegar to a cup of water is sharp by current taste; the recipe does not say what vinegar. Start with half the vinegar and add more to taste; a teaspoon of sugar is a common modern softener, though Oscar uses none.
- YieldThe recipe gives no cabbage weight and no yield. Reckoning on a tender white cabbage of about 2 lb, it would serve roughly six as a side. The full two cups of liquid is generous for that quantity — pour on what the leaves will take and leave the rest.
This is a German wilted-cabbage salad of the Krautsalat mit Speck type, made from bacon fat, vinegar and cabbage, and it resembles the hot bacon dressings still poured over dandelion greens and potatoes in Pennsylvania and the Midwest. Its presence in Oscar Tschirky's 1896 book is unsurprising: Oscar was Swiss-born. The hotel — the Waldorf, which became the Waldorf-Astoria only after the Astoria opened alongside it in 1897 — traded on French service and French menu language, but books like this one show how much plain Continental household cooking sat underneath the gilding: a salad of cabbage, bacon and vinegar, with no oil and no ceremony at all.