Home › Salad Dressings › Sour Cream Dressing
Sour Cream Dressing
1/2 pint sour cream 2 tablespoons lemon juice 2 tablespoons vinegar 1 scant tablespoon sugar 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper 1 teaspoon or more mixed mustard Beat the cream with an egg beater till smooth, thick and light. Mix the other ingredients together, and gradually add to the cream, beating all the while. Having beaten sour cream for a foundation the seasoning may be anything desired, as, for example, the mustard and lemon may be omitted, and the dressing be seasoned highly with any kind of catsup. A sweet cream may be substituted for the sour; it should be quite thick.
A whisked cream dressing rather than an emulsified one, and it depends entirely on the thickness of the cream you start with.
- 1/2 pintOne cup of sour cream. The finished dressing comes to roughly a cup and a half, enough for a large bowl of greens or a cabbage slaw for six to eight.
- "Mixed mustard"Prepared mustard, sold ready-mixed with vinegar, not dry mustard powder. A smooth Dijon or a plain yellow mustard both work; start at a teaspoon and taste.
- The cream itselfBefore commercial cultured sour cream, sour cream meant cream left to sour naturally, which was typically thinner than today's product. Modern cultured sour cream is thicker and already acidic, so add the lemon juice and vinegar gradually and stop when the balance suits you; the full four tablespoons may be more sourness than you want.
- Beating firstThe instruction to beat the cream alone until "smooth, thick and light" before anything else goes in is deliberate: the aeration is what gives the dressing its body. Whisk it up first, then trickle in the seasoning mixture.
- Egg beaterA balloon whisk or a hand mixer on low. High speed and prolonged beating will break sour cream down rather than build it up, so stop once it is thick and light.
- Sweet cream substitution"Quite thick" points to a heavy or whipping cream rather than a light one. Whip it before adding the seasoning, as with the sour cream.
- Catsup variationPeriod catsups included mushroom, walnut and tomato, all thinner and more vinegary than modern ketchup. If you use ketchup from a bottle, expect a noticeably sweeter dressing and cut the sugar.
- KeepingDress salad just before serving; the dressing itself holds three or four days covered in the refrigerator and will need a stir, as the whisked volume falls.
Sour cream dressings entered American cookbooks in good part through German, Bohemian and Scandinavian kitchens, where soured cream was an everyday by-product of a household that skimmed its own milk and where it went onto cucumbers, cabbage and lettuce. The recipe's assumption that a cook has half a pint of sour cream to hand marks it as pre-refrigeration writing: cream soured whether you wanted it to or not, and dressings like this one were as much a use for it as a choice. Books that leaned on dairy and eggs used them to carry the richness a joint would otherwise have supplied, and a cream dressing turns a plate of raw vegetables into something substantial enough to serve as a course. The open-ended closing note, that the seasoning "may be anything desired," is characteristic of the period's salad writing, which treated dressings as formulas to be varied rather than fixed recipes.