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June 1, 2009
My Mom's Coleslaw
My mom makes the best coleslaw in the world. It's really yummy, and it's incredibly easy and very cheap. It's so cheap and easy, in fact, that I always felt it was somehow WRONG to use the same recipe myself. I would try to doctor it up, make it more complicated, less Depression-era thrifty. I would add extra vegetables--grated carrot, diced green onion, red cabbage, etc--and use fancy mayonnaise. But it never tasted as good as the way my mom makes it, and finally I just surrendered to the magic that is her three-ingredient recipe for coleslaw.
Here it is:
plain old regular shredded cabbage
a big dollop of Miracle Whip (NOT mayonnaise)
juice from a jar of sweet pickles
Put the cabbage in a bowl. Add enough Miracle Whip to coat the cabbage, and enough sweet pickle juice to dilute the Miracle Whip. Tastes best if you make it a few hours ahead of time, then chill so that it's good and cold and the flavors blend.
Now, I do want to say that in general I don't like Miracle Whip--it's gross. I'm not sure it's actually food. I don't actually much like commercial mayonnaise, either, truth by told, but it seems more food-like than Miracle Whip. But Miracle Whip is the only thing that really tastes right in this recipe.
The sweet pickle juice is the most important ingredient, however. It provides a perfect amount of sweetness and tartness and it's just really, really good.
The one deviation I allow myself is that I put a little pepper in the dish. Mom didn't, because not everyone liked pepper, and you can always pepper it yourself at the table.
Take this to a Fourth of July picnic--I predict people will tell you how good it is.
Posted by holly at June 1, 2009 10:03 AM
This sounds tasty. My mother always made good coleslaw but this sounds way easier. For years, I thought Miracle Whip was mayonnaise perhaps because my mother called it that. I could have used a better food education growing up.
I also could have used a better food education growing up, Dale. I used to ask this question in classes: "How old were you when you realized your mom wasn't actually a very good cook?" Most students snicker, because they did realize it at some point. There's always someone who says, "My mom is a VERY good cook," to which I reply, "You're lucky."
So far no one has ever said, "My mom was a bad cook, but my dad was an AMAZING cook." Feeding families is still something mainly women do, it seems.