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Cream Dressing for Cold Slaw
Two table-spoons whipped sweet cream, two of sugar, and four of vinegar; beat well and pour over cabbage, previously cut very fine and seasoned with salt. - Miss Laura Sharp, Kingston.
A three-ingredient boiled-dressing alternative from the era before bottled mayonnaise. The whole thing hinges on proportion and on serving it at once.
- "Sweet cream"This means fresh, unsoured cream, as opposed to the sour cream or clabbered milk many households had on hand. Use heavy or whipping cream; anything lighter will not hold air.
- The measurement is ambiguous"Two table-spoons whipped sweet cream" could mean two spoonfuls measured before whipping or after. Two tablespoons of liquid cream whips up to roughly a quarter cup, and that fuller volume balances the vinegar better.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold cider vinegar in the 1880s was not standardised the way modern 5 percent vinegar is, so its strength here is unknown. Four tablespoons of modern vinegar against two of sugar and two of cream is aggressively sharp; start with half and add to taste.
- Serve immediatelyBeating acid into cream begins to break it down at once, and salted cabbage keeps weeping liquid. Dress the slaw at the table, not an hour ahead, or it slackens to a thin pool in the bowl.
- Salting the cabbageThe instruction to season the cabbage first is doing real work: salt draws water out and softens the shred. The recipe gives no standing time, so this is your choice: salt lightly and briefly for a crisp slaw, or salt and let it stand, then squeeze it out, for a limper one.
- YieldThe recipe names no quantity of cabbage. Eight tablespoons of dressing in all is enough for only a small bowlful -- roughly 4 cups shredded at a guess. Scale up in the same 2:2:4 proportion for a full head.
"Cold slaw" is an old anglicisation of the Dutch koolsla, cabbage salad, which is generally said to have entered American English through New York and to have been reinterpreted as "cold slaw" (which in turn produced the jokey "hot slaw" for wilted versions). Nineteenth-century American cookbooks give two main dressings for it: a cooked one thickened with egg and butter, and an uncooked one like this, where cream simply stands in for oil. Commercial mayonnaise was not yet a pantry staple, so a cook wanting something rich and quick reached for whatever cream was in the springhouse. The Dixie Cook-Book, like many regional compilations of the 1880s, gathered its contents by attribution from named contributors.