Coleslaw, also known as cole slaw, is a type of salad that is made primarily from finely shredded cabbage. Unlike many other salads, this salad actually includes the dressing as part of the recipe, meaning that it is far more flavorsome than other plain salads, and meaning that it can often be used as a kind of side dish, or as a topping in itself.
Coleslaw actually comes rom the Dutch term koolsla, which means cabbage salad. It can be found in a book dating back to 1770, titled The Sensible Cook: Dutch Foodways in the Old and New World. This recipe includes butter, vinegar, and oil.
Today, the recipe will most often include mayonnaise. This modern form of coleslaw has not been around for as long, which is a given considering that mayonnaise in itself is a relatively new invention.
There are not many rules as to what constitutes coleslaw however, with many different varieties and variations existing. In fact, there is reportedly only a single ingredient that is consistent across all the coleslaw recipes – and that is cabbage.
In this post, you’re going to see just how varied and versatile this salad is – we’ll be looking at fourteen different recipes, including not only recipes for making the salad, but also some of the various different things you can do with it.
1. Super Simple Slaw
This super simple coleslaw recipe is a great one to have in your wheelhouse and is a good one to start with as it will give us a great idea of what coleslaw is and how you go about making it. This recipe will take just 5 minutes to make, and you can then use it as the basis for a whole host of different variations.
This recipe will require just 8 cups of shredded cabbage, one cup of shredded red cabbage, and four julienned carrots. These should be extremely thin strips and should be light and flaky eaten on a fork.
Now add just a little bit of oil and a little bit of vinegar and you have the most basic version of coleslaw. And to be real, this would be more than interesting and tasty enough to be a great side along with any other meal. But of course we want to get a bit more ambitious than that.