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Cold Slaw
Finely shred cabbage, soak 1 hour in cold water and drain. Mix shredded cabbage with salad dressing. Serve on lettuce leaves. Finelychopped green pepper, onion and pimento may be added 1 cup cubed apple 1 cup celery
A bare-bones slaw from a booklet that assumed the reader already knew what "salad dressing" meant. Two things need attention: the soak, which is the whole point of the method, and the ragged list of add-ins at the end.
- The soak is the techniqueAn hour in cold water crisps limp cabbage by letting the shredded cells take up water. Ice water works faster, about 20-30 minutes. Drain hard and dry in a towel or spinner, or the dressing will slide off and pool.
- "Salad dressing" in 1900s American usageThis often meant a cooked or boiled dressing — egg yolks, vinegar, sugar, mustard, thickened over heat and thinned with cream — rather than oil-based mayonnaise, though mayonnaise was also current. A jarred salad dressing of the Miracle Whip type is the closest supermarket descendant; mayonnaise loosened with a spoon of cider vinegar and a pinch of sugar also reads correctly.
- The trailing lines are a garbled ingredient list"1 cup cubed apple" and "1 cup celery" belong with the optional additions in the preceding sentence, not as a separate step. Treat all of them — green pepper, onion, pimento, apple, celery — as elective, and add them after draining.
- PimentoSold then as canned whole or chopped sweet red peppers, mild and slightly cooked in texture. Jarred pimentos are still stocked near the olives; drained roasted red pepper, finely diced, is the same thing in effect.
- Seasoning is not mentionedThe soak leaches flavor as well as adding water. Salt the drained cabbage before dressing it, and check for acid — period boiled dressings tended to be sharper and sweeter than modern mayonnaise.
- Quantity and yieldNo cabbage weight is given. A medium head, roughly 2 lb, shreds to about 10 cups and takes three quarters to one cup of dressing, serving six to eight as a side.
- Dress lateSalted, dressed cabbage weeps within the hour. Combine shortly before serving if you want the shreds to stay stiff; the apple, if used, should be cut at the last minute or tossed with lemon.
"Cold slaw" is a folk respelling of koolsla, Dutch for cabbage salad, carried into American English by way of New York and generally traced in print to the late eighteenth century. Because English speakers heard the first syllable as "cole" or "cold," nineteenth-century cookbooks print both spellings, and a number of them go on to offer "hot slaw" as the logical opposite — wilted cabbage in a heated vinegar dressing. The recipe's setting matters as much as its name: the Metropolitan Cook Book was issued by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and handed out to policyholders as part of a broad campaign of domestic and nutritional advice. Cabbage was the year-round salad green of households without reliable refrigeration, and the cold-water soak here looks like a cellar-era trick for reviving a head that had been sitting a while.