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Cream Dressing (One cup thick sour cream not)
One cup thick sour cream (not old sour cream). Chill and stir in one teaspoon salt, a few grains cayenne, three tablespoons fine sugar and three tablespoons vinegar, diluted with one tablespoon cold water. Beat well and pour over cabbage, toss lightly with a fork and sprinkle with one teaspoon finely chopped parsley.
A sour-cream slaw dressing of the pre-mayonnaise sort, sharp and sweet in about equal measure. It comes together in a bowl in two minutes; the only real decisions are the cream and the timing.
- "Thick sour cream (not old sour cream)"At this date cream was commonly left to sour naturally until it thickened, and the parenthesis presumably steers you away from cream that has soured too far. Use full-fat commercial cultured sour cream, which is pasteurized and consistent; creme fraiche works and is milder.
- Keep it coldThe recipe tells you to chill before mixing, and cold cream stays noticeably thicker as the vinegar goes in.
- Add the vinegar last and slowlyThe recipe lists it after the salt and sugar. Whisking the diluted vinegar in a spoonful at a time helps keep the dressing smooth; adding it all at once can make the cream look broken.
- Fine sugarThis is superfine or caster sugar, ground finer than granulated so it dissolves in a cold, uncooked dressing. Granulated will work if you whisk long enough; it will taste gritty if you do not.
- Vinegar strengthThe recipe does not say which vinegar. Cider vinegar suits cabbage well here; the tablespoon of water softens the acid rather than stretching it. Bear in mind that vinegar strength was less standardised then than now, so taste as you go.
- Dress at the last minuteSalt and acid pull water out of shredded cabbage fast. Toss no more than fifteen minutes before serving or the slaw sits in a pale pool.
- YieldAround a cup and a quarter to a cup and a half of dressing once the sugar, vinegar and water go in; enough for a medium head of cabbage shredded fine.
- Seasoning checkA teaspoon of salt to one cup of cream is assertive by modern habit. Mix, taste against a shred of raw cabbage, and hold back some of the salt if the sour cream is already salted.
52 Sunday Dinners is generally credited to Elizabeth O. Hiller and was issued in 1913 by the makers of Cottolene, one of the cookbooks American food manufacturers published to put their product into home kitchens. A dressing like this one belongs to the older American tradition of cabbage salads bound with soured cream or a cooked boiled dressing rather than with mayonnaise, which required either a strong arm or a hand-cranked egg beater. Soured cream was simply what happened to yesterday's cream in a house without reliable refrigeration, and the parenthetical warning against "old sour cream" suggests that the line was one a cook might be expected to judge by nose. The sugar-and-vinegar balance here is three tablespoons of each.