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Sour Cream Salad Dressing
2 tablespoons water 1/4 cup lemon juice 1 egg 3/4 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon sugar 1 teaspoon oil Beat the egg, add the other ingredients, and cook in a double boiler, stirring it till creamy. Cool, and add one-half cup sour cream. Asparagus Jelly Salad (ten individual molds) 1 1/2 cans asparagus (small square cans) 2 small onions, sliced 1 bay leaf 1/4 ounce vegetable gelatin 2 hard-boiled egg yolks, chopped 1/4 cup chopped olives 1 teaspoon salt Cut off three fourths of an inch of the tip of each stalk of asparagus. Arrange these tips around the sides of ten jelly molds, five tips in each mold. Cook the rest of the asparagus ten minutes, with the onions and bay leaf. Add the vegetable gelatin, previously prepared for cooking in the usual way by soaking in hot water and draining several times. Cook till gelatin is dissolved. Rub through a colander. Add the egg yolks, olives and salt. Carefully put this mixture into the molds so as not to disturb the asparagus tips. When cold, unmold and serve on lettuce with mayonnaise.
A cooked-egg dressing in the old boiled-dressing tradition, thinned and enriched with sour cream at the end rather than with oil. The hinge is heat control: the egg must thicken without setting into curds.
- Keep the water below a simmerIn the double boiler, hold the water at a bare tremble and stir constantly. A whole-egg mixture thickens somewhere in the 150-170F range, and 160F is the usual figure for an egg mixture being safely cooked; a hard boil beneath it will scramble the egg in seconds.
- Add the cream off the heatThe half cup of sour cream goes in only after the base has cooled. Stirring cream into a hot acid base risks separating it, and reheating afterwards will break the dressing.
- The teaspoon of oil is not a typoThis is a sour-cream dressing, not a mayonnaise, so the oil is there for gloss and mouthfeel rather than as the body of the sauce. Do not scale it up expecting an emulsion.
- Sour cream then and nowEarly twentieth-century sour cream was cream left to ripen with its own bacteria and was thinner and sharper than the thick cultured product sold today. Commercial sour cream works; if it seems stiff, slacken the finished dressing with a spoonful of milk.
- Yield and useAbout one cup, enough for a large green salad. It is a dressing for lettuce, cold asparagus, beets or shredded cabbage rather than for delicate fruit.
- KeepingCover and refrigerate; use within three days. It thickens as it chills, so stir well and taste for salt and lemon before serving.
Boiled or cooked dressings like this one were a common American household alternative to mayonnaise. Thickening with a whole egg over hot water gave a sauce that held for days in an icebox, avoided the risk of a broken emulsion, and used less oil at a time when good salad oil was expensive in much of the country. Sour cream appears here because cream left to ripen at kitchen temperature soured of its own accord, and thrifty cookery books treated the result as a resource rather than a spoiled product. Dressings of this type persisted in home-economics teaching into the middle of the twentieth century.