No backyard cookout, barbecue, or platter of smoked meats is complete without a side of coleslaw. It's delicious no matter how you make it, and Daily Meal has counted no less than 13 distinctly different types of coleslaw . Although they're made with a variety of dressings and ingredients, they all have one thing in common: cabbage.
That's been around for a long, long time, and it turns out that for as long as people have been growing cabbage, they've been turning it into coleslaw. Head over to ancient Greece, and you'll find that cabbage has been an important crop for at least 2,600 years. It was valued not only as a food but for medicinal properties, and it turns out that tracing the cabbage family back to its wild roots and ancestors is pretty complicated.
Still, one of the best stories might come from the ancient Greeks, who said that the first cabbages grew from the places where Zeus's sweat dripped onto the ground. Yum! When it comes to coleslaw, the widely accepted opinion is that it was the ancient Romans who first served up a dish that we would recognize as coleslaw. It wasn't called coleslaw then, and figuring out just how that particular name came about is more than a little complicated.
An ancient Roman recipe helped introduce coleslaw to the world While no one is 100% certain just how cabbage spread across Asia, the Mediterranean, and into Europe, it's generally thought to have been introduced into new areas by either the ancient Romans or the ancient Celts — a.