Every year around Christmas our book club has a different sort of meeting.
Instead of books we have to have ready a favourite poem to recite
and we also make a meal of it, in that everyone brings a dish to
contribute to what amounts to our Christmas party.
The host house is allowed to decide who brings what.
This year the host is our friend Petra and her request to me was to bring a dish of coleslaw.
I do hope my rapidly sinking heart didn’t show on my face.
Of all the dishes in the world how could she have picked this one!
Coleslaw and I have a history.

In the early eighties a job came up in a small food producers which was making produce for delicatessens in Waterford.
I had, or thought I had had, enough of the antisocial hours of restaurant catering and, as this job was 9 to 5 and weekends off I thought I would give it a go.
As it turned out about 75% of the work went into the production of Coleslaw.
The daily routine consisted principally of shredding cabbage, carrots and onions and then mixing them with a very strong vinegary mayonnaise.
The actual mixing was in a large fibreglass bath both shaped and sized like a domestic bath.
We had discovered that to prolong the shelf life of the salad it was essential to crush the leaves as little as possible, and the best way of insuring this, it turned out, was to mix it by hand.
The mixer, had to kneel by the bath with full length plastic gloves taped to his armpits and mix what must have been about 60kg of coleslaw at a time.
The essential plastic gloves were available in the local chemists and we used to go through quite a few.
There was an amazing week when a Coleslaw factory in England went bust and we were suddenly making the bloody stuff by the ton.
Around that time I spent a lot of time running up and down to the chemist buying these gloves.
On one of these visits the Chemist himself came out from behind the counter and asked me quizzically;
“Do you mind me asking what do you do with these gloves?”
He had a full box in his hand as he asked me and it was only then that I realised what the gloves were intended to be used for.
(Waterford you must remember was at that time surrounded by cattle farms.)
They were vets gloves for artificially inseminating cows.
To my eternal shame I blushed, thereby convincing the Chemist that I was rampaging around the country side getting my sexual thrills using these gloves on comely Frisians.
I was instantly reminded of a line in a Tom Lehar song in which he had talked about a farmer who;
“had practised animal husbandry; until they caught him at it”
I may have tried to stutter an explanation but at that stage it was too late.

Shortly afterwards I decided that evenings and weekends weren’t what they were cracked up to be and went back to working in restaurants.
I hadn’t made Coleslaw since, you can perhaps understand why.
Today I decided it was time to lay the ghost so I took my courage in my hands and my largest spoon and bowl(no more gloves for me) I mixed another batch.
Maybe it was the time lapse (twenty odd years) our maybe it was because I radically modernised the recipe but the resulting Coleslaw is actually quite nice.
So you can see Petra, it is OK.
You have helped me to conquer my Coleslaw Block.

Here is the recipe.

New Coleslaw

½ Head or White Cabbage
¼ Head Celeriac
6 Carrots
2 Onions
4 eating apples

Dressing;

2 Teaspoons seedy mustard
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon Honey
Good grating of Black Pepper
6 Tablespoons White Wine Vinegar
225ml Sunflower Oil

To do this with any ease you need to have a food processor with a slicing blade.

Trim the cabbage and cut in four and discard the core.
Feed the rest through the slicing blade in your processor.

Change the blade to the coarse grater
Peel and slice the celeriac similarly and feed that through this blade.
Peel the carrots, peel and quarter the onions, quarter and core the apples but don’t peel and feed these through the grater also.
Mix these vegetables together.

Mix well together all the ingredients for the dressing except the oil
And then blend this into the other ingredients slowly.
Then dress the salad.
I think this benefits from being made the day before as this helps to soften the cabbage a little.
I also added a few walnuts and some sunflower seeds for posh.
They are not essential but do add to the crunch.