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Cabbage Salad
Mrs. J. H. Mead.
First prepare the cabbage by letting it stand for some time in cold water, in order to make it crisp ; dry well and shave as finely as possible. Choose a firm white cabbage. Dressing: Rub together a piece of butter the size of a walnut, and one tablespoon of flour; stir in two tablespoons of vinegar, and scald for a minute; then add the yolk of an egg (beaten) and two tablespoons of cream; salt and pepper to taste.
A cooked cream dressing of the sort that preceded bottled mayonnaise, poured over finely shaved raw cabbage. The quantities are small: this makes barely a third of a cup of dressing, enough for about half a small head.
- Butter the size of a walnutRoughly 1 tablespoon, or half an ounce. Shelled walnut, not the whole nut in its shell.
- The roux is the hingeRub the butter and flour to a smooth paste before any liquid goes in. Two tablespoons of vinegar is very little liquid for a tablespoon of flour, so lumps that form here will not disperse later.
- "Scald for a minute"Bring it just to the point of steaming and shimmering, not a rolling boil. The purpose is to cook the raw taste out of the flour.
- Adding the yolkThe recipe adds the beaten yolk straight to the scalded mixture. Safer practice is to take the pan off the heat, slacken the yolk with a spoonful of the hot vinegar mixture, then stir it back in; if you return it to low heat, do so briefly and stir constantly, until it thickens enough to coat a spoon (around 160F) without scrambling.
- Vinegar strengthNineteenth-century household vinegar varied a good deal in strength and cannot be assumed equivalent to today's 5 percent distilled. Cider vinegar suits this dressing better than white, and you may want to slacken it with a little water if it tastes harsh straight from the pan.
- CreamThen meant unpasteurised cream, gravity-separated and variable in richness. Heavy cream is a reasonable modern match; half-and-half will thin the dressing noticeably.
- Crisping the cabbageAn hour in cold water is ample. Dry it thoroughly, in a towel or a salad spinner, or the water will thin the dressing on contact.
- ServingDress it just before it goes to the table. Shaved cabbage in a cooked dressing weeps and softens within half an hour.
Cooked dressings like this one belong to the era before commercial mayonnaise, when binding egg and acid over gentle heat was a common home alternative to whisking oil into a raw yolk. A firm white cabbage kept in a cellar long after lettuce was gone, which is why it turns up as a salad in Ontario cookbooks of the 1870s, when The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto from contributions attributed to named local women. That method of soliciting recipes by attribution, as here to Mrs. J. H. Mead, followed the model of the American charitable cookbook, and the book became one of the most successful Canadian publishing ventures of the century. Recipes of this kind, with flour thickening rather than oil, are ancestors of the boiled dressing that survives in North American coleslaw.