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Whipped Sour Cream Salad Dressing
1 C sour cream 1 T sugar 1 t salt (Uncooked) 1½ T lemon juice 1½ T vinegar 1/4 t paprika Whip cream until stiff and add other ingredients. 1 egg
A plain uncooked dressing from the era when "sour cream" meant cream that had soured on its own, which matters a great deal here. Two things in the original need sorting out before you start: what to whip, and what to do with the egg that appears at the end of the list with no instructions attached.
- The hinge: what will actually whipCommercial cultured sour cream will not whip to stiff peaks; it is too acidic and too heavily thickened. Use heavy whipping cream soured with a spoonful of buttermilk or a teaspoon of lemon juice and left at room temperature until slightly thickened, or simply whip plain heavy cream and let the lemon juice and vinegar in the recipe supply the tang.
- The orphan eggThe egg is listed but never mentioned in the method, which is not unusual in community-cookbook typesetting. The likeliest reading is that it was beaten and folded in with the seasonings to give body, but the recipe does not say so. Since nothing here is cooked, use a pasteurized egg if you include it, or leave it out entirely; the dressing works without it.
- Add acid last and gentlyWhip the cream to stiff peaks first, then fold in the lemon juice, vinegar, sugar, salt and paprika. Pouring acid into cream before it has aerated will thin it and it will not recover.
- C, T, tC is cup, T is tablespoon, t is teaspoon: 1 cup cream, 1 tablespoon sugar, 1 teaspoon salt, 1½ tablespoons each lemon juice and vinegar, ¼ teaspoon paprika.
- Vinegar choiceThe recipe does not specify. Cider vinegar suits the sweet-sour profile; plain white distilled vinegar will read sharper, so you may want to start with 1 tablespoon and taste before adding the full 1 u00bd.
- SaltA full teaspoon in one cup is assertive by current taste. Add half, taste, then adjust.
- Yield and useRoughly one and a half to two cups once whipped, enough for a large fruit salad or a head of shredded cabbage. It is a folded, mousse-like dressing rather than a pourable one, and it will weep fairly quickly, so dress at the table.
Whipped sweet-sour cream dressings turn up in community and fundraising cookbooks, where they went over shredded cabbage, canned fruit, head lettuce wedges and molded gelatin salads. They belong to the same family as the old boiled dressings and "cooked salad dressings" that predate jarred mayonnaise in the American home kitchen, minus the cooking; before mechanical refrigeration was universal, cream that had gone sour was an ordinary daily ingredient rather than a special purchase, and recipes like this one existed partly to use it. The placement of a salad dressing in a chapter titled Pickles-Relishes reflects how loosely such books were organized.