Coleslaw for a Hot Day

Erma, you never cease to amaze me with the recipes you can add alcohol to. About the only thing you don’t seem to pickle are salads, and you have boozed up some of those.

For Father’s Day and a big family barbeque, I was asked to bring a triple making of Aunt Betty’s Creamy Coleslaw. We call it Aunt Betty’s in the family, but it really should be Grandmother Heffelfinger’s Coleslaw as it was her German recipe. I defy you to add bourbon to this.

Coleslaw and cabbage in general are in dire need of a good public relation’s campaign. Most people think of coleslaw as that side dish that comes with fast food fried chicken and fish. If only they knew the truth: Coleslaw is a health food and comes in many tastes and varieties. Because it stores well (like months, if you know how), cabbage, and carrots, which also are a coleslaw staple, were about the only “fresh” vegetables available during the winter months.

Another advantage to coleslaw is that most recipes will hold nicely in the refrigerator for a couple of days, which is not true of many lettuce salads. Aunt Betty’s is a good example.

Aunt Betty’s Creamy Coleslaw:

1/2 cup mayonnaise
1 tablespoon vinegar
2 teaspoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon celery seeds
dash of salt
4 cups of finely sliced (not grated or chopped) green cabbage
2 medium carrots
2 green onions

Clean and roughly grate with a grater the carrots. At once scrape the carrots into the mayonnaise and let stand while preparing the rest of the slaw. Stir several times. The carrots tint the mayonnaise a pale orange.

Either slice the cabbage or use a food processor with a slicing attachment. Finely chop the green onions including all of the tops.

When the mayonnaise is pale orange, stir in the vinegar, sugar, celery seeds and salt. Mix well; then fold in the remaining vegetables. Store in the refrigerator in a covered container like these Pyrex Storage Containers for 2 to 24 hours. This makes about 6 servings.

Aunt Betty used Grandmother’s wooden kraut cutter to get that uniform thin slice of cabbage so necessary for this recipe. There are metal devices out there that claim to slice as well. Remember in the Fifties and Sixties there was that 3 legged round slicer that every modern housewife had to have? It must have been one of the first T.V. promotions. You had to hold the vegetables down with a plunger in one hand and turn a crank with the other. Most of the time it didn’t slice very well, it just jumped around on the counter. It was too small and the slicing disks were not sharp. The invention of the food processor retired that “labor saver” to the antique shelf along with cherry pitters and apple peelers.