Coleslaw is a salad of shredded cabbage with a dressing. In Mexico and Central America, curtido is lightly fermented or pickled cabbage, often with the addition of carrots and onions. Koreans serve namuls or seasoned vegetable ‘salads,’ and are famous for cabbage kimchi. The Germans make sauerkraut.
The Dutch who founded New Netherland (New York State)…grew cabbage extensively along the Hudson River. They served it in their old-country ways, often as koolsla (shredded cabbage salad). This dish became popular throughout the colonies and survives as coleslaw…
…a combination of kool, “cabbage,” and sla, “salad” …—from foodtimeline.org
I was making chili—warm red and fragrant on a snowy afternoon. As a side dish, I wanted something tangy and fresh for contrast. There is a recipe in Hiroko Shimbo’s book, The Japanese Kitchen, for kyabetsu no sokuseki zuke: quick salt-pickled cabbage. Quick, in this case means five hours, and because of the snow it had taken two hours to shop so the recipe was out of the question. My solution comes from making other tsukemono: I salted the finely shredded cabbage and carrots in a plastic bag with a weight on top for two hours—long enough to remove excess water from the vegetables leaving them tender-crisp. The result: coleslaw colorful enough for a Japanese bento!
“Salad, a term derived from the Latin sal (salt), which yielded the form salata, ‘salted things’ such as the raw vegetables eaen in classical times with a dressing of oil, vinegar or salt. The word turns up in Old French as salade and then in late 14th century English as salad or sallet.”
—Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson [Oxford Univeristy Press:Oxford] 2nd edition, 2006 (p. 682)—from foodtimeline.org
Colorful Coleslaw
Toss the cabbage and carrot shreds with the salt and seal them in the plastic bag. Place the bag into one food container and stack the other container on top. Use the can to weigh down the salted vegetables. Leave this arrangement on your counter for two hours. Check to see if the salt is drawing water from the vegetables and add salt if needed. Rinse the cabbage carrot mixture with fresh water. Drain and squeeze dry in a clean kitchen towel.
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Cabbage: Albanian lakër; rrobaqeës Basque – aza, berza Belarusan – kapusta Bengali – bAdhA kopi Chinese (phonetic-Mandarin)- juan-xin-cai , bao-xin-ca Czech – hlavka zeli Danish – kaal Dutch – kool (de) Esparanto – brasik/o Estonian – kapsas Finnish – kaali French – chou ( “mon chou” or “mon petit chou”, equivalent to “darling” but translated literally as “my little cabbage”) German – Kohl Greek – λάχανο (láchano) Hawaiian – kapiki Hebrew – כרוב (the term “rosh kruv” (cabbagehead) implies stupidity) Hindi – Patta Gobi Indonesian- kol, kubis Irish – leitís chabáiste Italian – cavolo (a mildly impolite expression with a similar connotation to the English “crap.”) Japanese – Kyabetsu キャベツ Latin – Brassica oleracea Latvian – KA¯POSTI Lithuanian- kopu¯stas Maori – kapiti, kapeti Norwegian- kål Persian – kalam Polish – kapusta Portuguese – repolho Romanian – VARZAö, CAöPAöT¸ ÂNAö DE VARZAö Serbian -kupus Slovak – hlávka kapusty Spanish – col Swahili – Kabeji Tagalog – repolyo Tibetan – kram Turkish – LÂHANA Ukranian – kapusta Urdu – gobi Vietnamese – tõ lãng Yiddish – KROIT —from cheriestihler.com |
“Ménager la chèvre et le chou,” Negotiate with a sheep and a cabbage. google translate: pussyfoot
Tess's Japanese Kitchen 