“We are hot slaw,” says Ross Weaver, owner of The Chef, a burger joint in Cleveland, Tennessee. “People from 10 miles away don’t know what it is—even the next communities over, in Athens or Chattanooga, let alone 49 other states in this country.” And yet, according to Weaver, who grew up here, everyone in town has a closely guarded, and possibly hotly contested, recipe based on the original, created at a now-defunct 1950s drive-in movie concession stand. Hot slaw is also available at gas stations, grocery stores, food trucks, and local diners.
Cleveland lies in the Great Appalachian Valley, a little west of the Blue Ridge Mountains, in a corner of Tennessee that snuggles up to Alabama and Georgia. Originally a territory occupied by the Cherokee Nation, and bitterly divided during the Civil War, today the city is mostly industrial, one of the largest manufacturing hubs in the Southeast, but its true claim to fame was a long time coming, when the Tennessee state legislature named hot slaw its first official state food in 2024, beating out Memphis barbecue, Nashville hot chicken, banana pudding, and country ham. So how did that happen?
Cold cabbage salad was introduced to North America by the Dutch in the early 17th century. The term coleslaw is derived from the Dutch koolsla, a combination of kool, or cabbage, and sla, meaning salad. The first recorded recipes consisted of finely chopped cabbage, dressed with vinegar and oil or melted butter, but that would change with the introduction of commercial mayonnaise brands, which became a staple of Southern grocery shelves at the turn of the 20th century. According to The Joy of Cooking (1997), raw cabbage is the only consistent ingredient in classic coleslaw. Everything else added—carrots, pickles, onions, radishes, bacon, even Brussels sprouts—is up for debate. And in the version that has put Cleveland on the culinary map, that can mean mouth-blistering peppers.
Hot slaw is not cooked. The heat comes from chilies, most typically mild jalapeños, but it’s merely a starting point, because some people can handle higher spice levels than others, and that’s where the dialogue can get fiery…