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February 27
Menu: Sago Soup; Brown Stew of Mutton Chops; Boiled Potatoes; Stewed Turnips; Cabbage Salad; Lemon Sponge; Coffe Cabbage Salad-Shave 2 cups shredded cabbage in thin strips or chop fine and mix with the following dressing: 2 tablespoons Crisco, 1/2 cup hot vinegar, 1 teaspoon dry mustard, 1 tablespoon sugar, 1 teaspoon salt, 18 teaspoon pepper, 1/2 onion, cut fine, and 1/2 cup sweet or sour cream, milk or water. Dissolve the sugar in cream. Mix with rest of the ingredients. Mix while hot and serve with the salad slightly warmed.
A hot boiled-style slaw dressing built on Crisco rather than bacon fat or butter, from the era when the new vegetable shortening was being pushed into every category of cooking. It comes together in one pan and is dressed warm.
- The hinge: dress it warm, serve it warmThe dressing must be hot when it meets the cabbage, and the cabbage only slightly warmed. Cold shortening in a cold bowl sets into a waxy film; heat keeps it emulsified and lets the vinegar soften the cabbage without cooking it limp.
- The pepper quantity"18 teaspoon pepper" is 1/8 teaspoon. Read the fraction back into it.
- Crisco and its substitutesCrisco in 1913 was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, blander than the butter or drippings it replaced. Two tablespoons of butter, mild oil or bacon drippings all work here; drippings are the usual fat in hot slaws of this kind.
- Hot vinegarHalf a cup of straight vinegar is assertive by modern taste. Use cider vinegar rather than distilled white, and taste before adding all of it — the sugar is only one tablespoon, so there is little to balance the acid.
- "Sweet or sour cream, milk or water"Sweet cream means plain unsoured cream. The four options are not equivalent: cream gives a dressing close to a modern creamy slaw, water gives a sharp vinegar dressing. Sour cream may curdle visibly when the hot vinegar hits it, which is cosmetic rather than a fault.
- Dissolving the sugarOne tablespoon of sugar dissolves only slowly in cold cream. Warm the cream slightly, or whisk the sugar into the hot vinegar instead and add the dairy last, off the heat.
- Cabbage cutTwo cups of shredded cabbage is roughly a quarter of a small head, about 6 oz. Cut it thin — 1/8 inch or finer — since the warm dressing has only a minute or two to work on it.
- YieldServes three or four as a side. It does not keep; the cabbage weeps and the dressing separates on standing.
This is a hot slaw of the sort German-settled American kitchens are generally traced to having made for generations, in which a warm sweet-sour dressing stands in for mayonnaise or wiled lettuce with bacon fat. What is new here is the fat. The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913 to teach cooks what to do with a product that had no culinary tradition behind it, and the surest route was to rewrite familiar recipes with Crisco in the place formerly held by butter, lard or drippings. A hot slaw dressing was a good target: the fat is only there to carry the vinegar and coat the cabbage, so the substitution goes almost unnoticed.