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Cabbage Salad (Put the milk and vinegar)
Put the milk and vinegar on to heat in separate sauce-pans; when the vinegar boils, add butter, sugar, salt and pepper, and stir in the chopped cabbage; cover, and let scald and steam-not boil-for a moment, meanwhile, remove hot milk from stove, cool a little, and stir in the well-beaten and strained yolks; return to stove, and boil a moment. Dish cabbage and pour custard over it, stir rapidly with a silver spoon until well mixed, and set immediately in a cold place.
A boiled-dressing slaw of the kind that predates bottled mayonnaise. The method is sound, but the original assumes you already have the quantities from the head of the entry and that you know how a yolk custard behaves.
- No quantities givenThe text is instructions only; the proportions belonged to a companion entry or to the cook's judgment. A workable ratio for a medium head of cabbage is about a cup of milk, half a cup of vinegar, two to three yolks, a tablespoon of butter, and sugar and salt to taste.
- The hinge: never let the yolk custard actually boilDespite the instruction to "boil a moment," yolks thickened in milk set into curds somewhere around 180F. Hold it just below a simmer, stirring constantly, until it coats the spoon, then pull it off. Once it breaks it cannot be brought back.
- Two pans for a reasonTwo pans -- The milk and vinegar are heated apart because they are two separate preparations: the vinegar dresses and scalds the cabbage, the milk becomes the custard. Acid does curdle hot milk, so keep them apart until the end, when the custard is poured over the dished cabbage and stirred in.
- Scald, do not cook, the cabbage"Let scald and steam-not boil-for a moment" means the briefest covered heat; the recipe sets no time. Shredded cabbage held past that point goes limp and sulphurous, which is the difference between this and stewed cabbage.
- Vinegar strengthNineteenth-century household vinegar varied in strength and should not be assumed equivalent to today's 5 percent cider vinegar. Taste the hot vinegar before committing; you may want to cut it with a spoonful of water.
- The silver spoonSilver was probably specified because iron and tin utensils of the period could discolour and taint acid foods. Any stainless or wooden spoon does the same job now.
- Straining the yolksPushing beaten yolks through a sieve removes the chalazae, the white cords, which would otherwise show as pale threads in the finished dressing.
- ServingChill thoroughly before serving; the dressing thickens further as it cools. A medium head of cabbage dressed this way will serve roughly six as a side, and it is best eaten the same day, since the cabbage weeps overnight.
Boiled dressings like this one filled the gap before commercial mayonnaise: a cooked custard of egg yolk, vinegar, sugar and milk or cream, keeping better than an emulsion of raw yolk and oil and costing far less in a household where oil was scarce and eggs were not. The style is generally traced to German and Pennsylvania-Dutch cooking, where hot vinegar dressings on cabbage and potatoes were standard, and it spread through American community cookbooks in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Dixie Cook Book, compiled by Estelle Woods Wilcox and published out of Atlanta in the 1880s, was one of the large subscription compilations of the era, assembled from contributed household recipes, which may be why entries like this one often arrive as bare method, with the proportions perhaps left to a neighboring paragraph or simply to the cook.