With only one exception (Locally Grown Gardens makes an Asian-inspired slaw, easily the best in the entire county), restaurants around here offer bland, mayonnaise-heavy shredded cabbage concoctions; there's even a TV ad from a mayo company in which a defiant loner in a diner slams his slaw onto a hamburger sandwich and proceeds to enjoy it with gusto while a voice-over announcer suggests he did so solely for the white condiment--*
But mayonnaise isn't even required. Most of the homemade slaw of my youth -- and good many of the lunch-counter versions back then -- based the slaw dressing on vinegar, sugar and water plus spices. I picked up a bag of shag-cut cabbage at the store a couple of days ago (all their instant salads were a day shy of expiring and looked it) and proceeded to make my own. Cider vinegar is better for this but I had only white vinegar. Mixing by taste, I ended up using the basics listed above plus black pepper, celery seed, a tiny pinch of salt and -- just to see how it would work out -- nutmeg.
It worked out fine, albeit needing the amount of vinegar reduced after it had sat a day, and tastes just as good as I remember.
Hey, who was Cole? He or she wasn't; it's an English-language pronunciation of the Dutch word for cabbage, kool. Cool!
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* As if! The northern Indiana fast-food chain Penguin Point has offered a cabbage leaf on their burgers for years and it's way better than lettuce.
Update
2 days ago
4 comments:
Off-topic re coleslaw, but I wanted to comment on your last post. Yeah, I know you left the comment function off for a reason, but I'm a dick that way.
I just wanted to say: That last paragraph was really very poignant and struck a chord with me.
That's appropriate.
I never used to care for coleslaw. It used to be a staple of school lunches. Only in the last ten or 20 years have I developed a taste for it. Cabbage used to be a staple. I've often run across passages in novels where someone is commenting on the smell of cooking cabbage, usually in a negative way. For some reason, when Europeans came to America, one of the first things they did was to stop eating cabbage and sauerkraut. And now everyone is dying of cancer. Coincidence? I think not!
I have always liked it, pretty much in whatever form. Simmered corned beef and cabbage on New Years Day, fried in wedges, shredded in coleslaw, with green salads, even pickled. I'm fond of the entire edible brassica line: Turnips, rutabaga, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, kohlrabi, mustard.... There's more than comedy in Terry Pratchett's choice of crops for Discworld's Sto plains.
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