Winter Cabbage Salad

Today, we are making a winter salad! The recipe uses produce that's easy to find in the winter months. And thanks to climate change, a salad seems really good right now.

Winter Cabbage Salad The ingredients for this salad are easily available all winter. Refrigerate all the ingredients until thoroughly chilled. Mix: 2 cups shredded cabbage (This is not a lot of cabbage. Unless you get a very runty cabbage, you'll find that you barely use more than one or two slices of it. Cut it from the end opposite of the stem, where the leaves are thinner and less tough. Save the rest of the cabbage for another use.) 1 cup finely chopped celery (About half of the usual-sized bunch of celery) 1 diced apple (No need to peel it. Use a tart variety that tastes good when eaten uncooked.) 1 teaspoon finely chopped yellow or white onion (cut the tip off an onion, chop it, and put the rest of the onion back in the fridge for another use) 1 chopped fresh pimiento, or one (2-oz) undrained jar chopped pimientos (You can also chop in half of a bell pepper if you like) When ready to serve, toss with: About 2 tablespoons mayonnaise (more or less as desired) Salt and seasonings to taste (I added a generous shake of chili powder) Serve immediately, on lettuce leaves or in apple cups if desired. Mrs. T. O. Carr, 5116 Locke Street, Fort Worth, TX; Fort Worth Star-Telegram; January 25, 1930; page 8

Apparently the Fort Worth Star-Telegram had an ongoing reader recipe contest in the 1930s. Was that a newspaper trend in the Depression? We've seen recipe contests from Chicago, Philadelphia, and now Fort Worth. All three cities printed the submitters' names and home addresses under their prize-winning creations. (And those are just the newspapers I could flip through before my free newspapers.com trial ran out.)

At any rate, this salad won Mrs. T. O. Carr first prize in late January of 1930. She notes that "the ingredients of this salad are available all Winter." And a quick scan of the ingredient lists shows no out-of-season produce (except maybe the optional lettuce at the end). 

Fort Worth Star-Telegram; January 25, 1930; page 8

 

The recipe starts out with two cups of shredded cabbage. That is less cabbage than you probably think. We took a sliver off the top of a head of cabbage and that was more than enough.

Our future has a lot of colcannon.

You can tell this recipe comes from an era of sharp economizing. After taking a small section off a cabbage without using too much of it, we do the same with an onion. To emphasize, this recipe calls for one teaspoon of chopped onion. 

On the other hand, one cup of chopped celery required all but the tiniest inner sticks out of our celery bunch. Granted, we got one of the smaller celeries at the store. But apparently cabbage expands when you chop it, and celery compacts.

This can get dropped into a future pot of soup.

After all our chopping, we only had to unite our ingredients. Incidentally, I really like that this bowl came with a lid. It reduces mixing to a few vigorous shakes.

After our salad was perfectly tossed, it was time for the dressing. I was going to buy mayonnaise, but it has followed the price of eggs upward. I don't have any food-snob objections to mayonnaise, but I didn't want to pay a lot of money for something I would not use again. I let a few mayonnaise packets slip in my pocket the next time I was somewhere that had them next to the ketchup dispenser.

I tasted the salad and realized that it would benefit from a delicate smattering of chili powder. Well, our directions do tell us to "add enough mayonnaise to moisten and season." This is why one should always actually read the recipe instead of blaming it.

Mrs. T. O. Carr tells us to serve this in apple cups or on lettuce leaves. I didn't feel like hollowing out a lot of apples (though that would let us economically dice the inner fruit into the bowl and save its shell for serving). Nor did I want to pay for lettuce-- though it's interesting to see this anecdotal hint that iceberg lettuce was already cheap by 1930. A bowl sufficed.

This salad is a lot better than I expected, and just the perfect hit of fresh greens while all the other leafy things are out of season. For such a simple recipe, everything was perfectly balanced. It had just enough onion to give it a sharp kick without tasting like raw onions. The apple gave it just a bit of sweetness, but not enough to suggest we added any sugar. And the cabbage was sturdy enough to be the perfect complement to everything else. Lettuce would have been too delicate.

In closing, this is a really nice salad if you don't mind a fair bit of chopping. And it's a refreshing dose of greens while we wait for the summer fruits to come back for the season.