When I was 20, I got a job working at Kentucky Fried Chicken . I was juggling about four jobs at the time, including running a bunch of possum trapping lines, and a skin tacking business, in an attempt to pay the mortgage on the house I had purchased with my then boyfriend, support his four young children and cover his big-ticket booze habit. Love, as they say, is blind.
Three times a week I would put on my uniform, plaiting my long hair into braids and biking over to the KFC in downtown Gisborne for my shift. We were trained to upsell on every order. “Would you like fries with that sir, or mash and gravy?” The chiller cabinet was stacked with little white plastic pottles filled with the Colonel’s signature creamy coleslaw .
The vegetables in said slaw amounted solely to finely diced cabbage, carrots and onions but there was a pleasing bite of horseradish that carried through the creamy dressing. You couldn’t really pick the flavour unless you knew it was in there. Apparently, these days they don’t add the horseradish.
But the one thing I took from my time at KFC is a dollop of horseradish in my coleslaw dressing. It’s such a great flavour match with the cabbage. I often make a fat-free dressing with a big spoon of horseradish, another of mustard, a lug of rice or cider vinegar and some salt and fine white pepper.
It’s great in any kind of cabbage-based slaw, as well as beetroot salads (raw and cooked) and with both crisp and bitter greens. Even at this early st.