Coleslaw
During a discussion of the joys of coleslaw, an Englishman admitted he adds cheddar cheese to his. (He doesn’t admit to it on his blog, I just thought you needed to know my source - in the interests of accurate history, of course :). )
This led - as night follows day - to a request for the history of coleslaw. I thought it would be a useful exercise in how I trace recipes back in time.
I started off with nineteenth century English cookbooks and found nothing there. I wasn’t expecting anything - I know the shape of salads in the first half of the nineteenth century in England and coleslaws didn’t fit it, but I had to check. Before I got out my cookbooks from the late nineteenth century, I checked early US cookbooks.
The US in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century is the obvious ‘other’ route for new entries into English food (along with the Indian subcontinent). It’s particularly handy for food that sound vaguely Spanish or Dutch and some types of French food.
So I went almost straight to Dutch foodways. ‘Cole’ is a good English word for cabbage, but ’slaw’ isn’t. Dutch and Flemish recipes are the first place I check when words are very, very close to English but not quite, because they’re so similar to English. Names of recipes are often interesting clues to foodways.
I found cabbage salads in Dutch-American foodways in the eighteenth century and my guess is that it went from New Amsterdam to New York and from New York to the broader English-speaking world. I don’t know when mayonnaise became the standard dressing - that’s a task for another day. What’s interesting, though, is that cabbage salad with a non-mayonnaise dressing is still made in some parts of the US.
At this stage, all I have are the broad tracks. I’d have to do a lot more work to find out dates of first appearance in various places and to find the actual routes it took to reach England and cheese coleslaw.
Let me give you two quite different recipes for cabbage salad, an eighteenth century one from p. 116 of The Sensible Cook (tr and ed Peter Rose), which is a book I must blog some day, all about Dutch Foodways in the New World and the other from 1980s Arkansas (from p. 93 of Calico Cupboards, which I have already blogged).
Cabbage Salad (c 1770)
2 cups of green cabbage, cut finely
2 cups red cabbage, cut finely
1/3 cup wine vinegar
1/4 cup vegetable oil or melted butter
Salt and pepper.
Mix ingredients well and let sit.
Overnight Cabbage Salad (recipe by Debrah Brooks)
1 large cabbage, shredded
1 green pepper, chopped fine
1 large onion, chopped fine
2 tbs salt
2 cups boiling water
1 tsp celery seed
1 tsp mustard seed
1 2 oz jar pimientos
1 cup cider vinegar
Combine cabbage, pepper and onion in a alrge bowl. Sprinkle with salt. Pour boiling water over cabbage mixture. Let stand one hour; wrong and dry cabbage mixture with hands. Mix remaining ingredients; ; let stand until sugar dissolves. Pour over cabbage mixture. Let stand in refrigerator overnight.
Now if I can persuade Dave to give us his cheese coleslaw recipe, you will have more ways of dealing with cabbage than you ever thought you would need.
food history, cabbage, cabbage salad, coleslaw history, recipes, cheese coleslaw
May 11th, 2007 at 5:25 pm
It’s dutch? I never saw that one coming lol.
I’ll happily give you my cheese coleslaw recipe…
Take any type of coleslaw, home-made or bought, and grate some cheddar cheese into it. Mix well, and voila! Cheese coleslaw
Thanks for the link
May 11th, 2007 at 8:15 pm
Fascinating!
One thing I always marvel at when I read your blog is how people knew how to cook (and of course some still do!). But these days — and me growing up — it was either out of a box or deep fried till golden brown. Coming to Japan has really given me a love, admiration and respect for food and all its possiblities.
Cheddar cheese should be allowed in everything. *wink*
May 13th, 2007 at 4:12 am
Thank you for the coleslaw post!
May 13th, 2007 at 4:22 am
Emma dn Dave - you’re quite welcome. I took an evil pleasure in proving that Dave’s cooking is a little Dutch :).
Madderblue - it’s interesting how important family is to all this. I come from a family of cooks, so for me the boxes always have a sense of ‘wow’ to them :).
May 13th, 2007 at 8:57 pm
I posted a recipe a while back for an Amish saurkraut salad which bears some resemblence to those two recipes, except for the cabbage being pre-pickled. One of my readers commented that it was almost identical to something he remembered his mother making in his youth.
May 13th, 2007 at 10:17 pm
Amish have quite specific regional roots, don’t they? I’ll check it out. It may have got to our cooking via the Dutch, and existed in other Continental traditions as well before then. I’ll keep an eye open for it travelling from Amish to wider US, but that’s not a common path, so it would need a particular impetus.
I can see coleslaw is going to be in the background for a bit!
May 14th, 2007 at 3:30 am
I have an old Dutch cook book, my mother’s high school text, (1934) Of the many salad (sla) combinations are (1) white cabbage (witte kool) green apples and red beets; (2) red cabbage (rode kool), celery and green lettuce leaves. These combinations both may be mixed with mayonaise once shredded.
I suspect the words ‘cole’ and ’slaw’ are of Scandinavian origin.
May 14th, 2007 at 3:45 am
Rita, that is one cool cookbook.
I checked the etymology, because I admit I had assumed it was Dutch and that the logical path into English was from the English colonies near/on top of the Dutch colonies in the New World, but I hadn’t done the obvious first check and looked up word usage outside cookboks.
The giant online version of the Oxford English Dictionary (which has the best cataloguing of earlier uses of words I’ve seen, though it can be patchy) has this quote as its earliest attested use:
1794 Massachusetts Spy 12 Nov., “A piece of sliced cabbage, by Dutchmen ycleped cold slaw.”
So coleslaw was the name given to dishes that had sliced cabbabge as the major ingredient, in the region of Massachusetts in the late 18th century. This fits my theory. I’m beginning to like my theory :). And I love it that the word ‘ycleped’ was used instead of ‘called’ - that’s a very late usage!
May 16th, 2007 at 4:08 am
Yes, the cookbook is pretty good. Still referred to for traditional recipes, with plenty of mysterious ingredients which we Dutch Australians have no idea about.
Well, it’s pretty interesting, the way that the word ’slaw’ was probably an American/Dutch pronunciation of ’sla’. And the fact that cole refers to cold … which fits, as there are a number of warm salad dishes in the 1934 cook book, so a fairly traditional idea.
Funny, because I always thought sla was a recent abbreviation of the French salade
May 16th, 2007 at 4:13 am
I understand the original word was “koolsla” - at least, that’s what the OED claims :). Its prevalence as a dish in English language countries is rather cool: all it took was a little overlap of settlement in NE America :). It had to be a cool country overlap - the main other place for crossover was the Indonesian region, and cabbage was/is much harder to grow there.