Hamburg Salad
Beat one egg until well mixed; add three tablespoonfuls of water, three tablespoonfuls of tarragon vinegar, one-half of a teaspoonful of salt, a dash of cayenne and one quarter of a teaspoonful of dry mustard; drop into this two tablespoonfuls of butter, and stir over hot water until thick and smooth; pour this while hot over one quart of shaved white cabbage, and mix thoroughly; when cold, sprinkle over it one teaspoonful of onion juice, or one tablespoonful of finely chopped onion, one dessert spoonful of grated horseradish, one-half of a cupful of grated smoked beef (if too fresh to be grated it should be chopped very fine), and one cupful of cooked or canned shrimps cut in small bits. Mix and stand away for an hour and serve.
A cooked-dressing slaw dressed up with chipped beef and shrimp — a Gilded Age composed salad rather than a side dish. The dressing is the only part that needs technique.
- Keep the dressing off direct heatThe egg mixture goes into a bowl set over simmering water, not into a pan on the burner. Stir constantly until it coats a spoon; direct heat will scramble it in seconds. Take it to about 160F for a fully cooked custard base.
- Dessert spoonfulTwo teaspoons — the size sits between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. It is not a modern measure and no equivalent spoon is in a standard set.
- A quart of shaved cabbageBy volume, loosely packed, that is roughly 10 to 12 oz of cabbage, something under half a medium head. "Shaved" means sliced as thin as you can manage, not chopped.
- Grated smoked beefThis is dried, salt-cured beef — the pressed chipped beef sold in jars or thin-sliced at a deli counter. Modern deli or jarred beef is unlikely to be dry enough to grate, so chop or shred it fine, as the recipe itself allows.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve. The recipe offers the juice and the chopped onion as alternatives; the juice disperses more evenly through the salad, the chopped onion stays as distinct bites.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and worth seeking out — plain white vinegar leaves the dressing flat. Failing that, warm cider vinegar with a few bruised tarragon sprigs and let it stand an hour.
- The shrimpCanned shrimp was widely available at the time and is very soft; the recipe allows either cooked or canned. Small cooked shrimp, drained and patted dry, hold up far better; add them last so they do not shred in the mixing.
- SaltChipped beef and canned shrimp are both heavily salted. Hold back the half teaspoon in the dressing until you have tasted the finished salad.
- Resting and yieldThe hour in the cold is not optional — it softens the cabbage and lets the horseradish and onion spread through. Serves four to six as a first course or lunch salad.
Nineteenth-century American cookbooks distinguished sharply between "French dressing" — oil and vinegar — and the boiled or cooked dressing used here, an egg-and-butter emulsion thickened over water. The Hamburg name may point at the cabbage: shredded raw cabbage in a sharp dressing was read as German, though in this period Hamburg attaches equally to smoked beef and to Hamburg steak. What marks this out as something more than a plain slaw is the trio of chipped beef, canned shrimp and horseradish — dried beef and canned shellfish were both cheap, shelf-stable and newly abundant, and cooks used them the way a later generation used tinned tuna, to turn a vegetable into a meal.