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Sour Cream Dressing
1 cup sour cream 1 egg 1 teaspoon vinegar 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon sugar 1/4 teaspoon mustard 1/8 teaspoon pepper Mix dry ingredients, combine with the egg slightly beaten, add cream slowly and cook in double boiler until like custard, when cool add vinegar.
A boiled dressing of the old school: an egg-thickened custard rather than an emulsion, meant for cabbage, cucumbers, potatoes or a wilted lettuce. Two details carry it, the gentle heat and the late addition of vinegar.
- Add the vinegar last, and only when coldAdd the vinegar last, and only once the dressing has cooled, as the recipe directs -- acid stirred into a hot egg-and-cream mixture is more likely to curdle it, which is the likely reason for the order.
- Double boiler heatKeep the water at a bare simmer and stir. The book's test is the only one given: cook until it is "like custard," i.e. until it coats the back of a spoon. Roughly 170-180F on a thermometer; much beyond that the egg begins to curdle.
- The sour cream has changedIn this period the term generally meant cream left to sour naturally, thinner and tangier than the modern product. Commercial cultured sour cream is thicker, and often contains stabilisers; it works, but thin it with a tablespoon or two of milk so it pours before you heat it.
- Mustard means dry mustardPowdered mustard, not the prepared jar sort. A quarter teaspoon of prepared mustard would add both liquid and vinegar in the wrong place.
- Sugar and saltOne teaspoon of sugar in a cup of dressing is seasoning, not sweetness. Mixing the dry ingredients together first, as directed, keeps the mustard and pepper from clumping in the egg.
- Yield and keepingAbout one cup, enough for a salad for four to six. Refrigerate and use within three or four days; it thickens as it chills and can be loosened with a spoonful of cream.
The Gold Medal Flour Cook Book was one of the many promotional cookbooks issued by the Washburn-Crosby milling company of Minneapolis, the firm that would later become General Mills, and its recipes lean toward the plain cooking of the upper Midwest. A cooked dressing like this one belonged to a tradition older than the mayonnaise jar: before commercial emulsified dressings were widely sold, household salads were dressed with either a plain oil-and-vinegar mixture or a boiled dressing thickened with egg and sometimes flour. The sour cream version, tangy and free of oil, is often said to descend from German and Scandinavian kitchens, where soured cream dressings on cucumber and cabbage were long established, though the derivation is traditional rather than documented.