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Sour-Cream Salad Dressing
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon lemon-juice
1 teaspoon sugar
2 tablespoons vinegar
⅛ teaspoon cayenne
1 cup sour cream
This makes an excellent dressing for vegetable salads. Place the salt, sugar, and pepper together in a bowl, mix well and add the lemon-juice, then the vinegar. When the mixture is perfectly smooth, put in the cream, stir well and set on the ice until needed.
A cold, uncooked dressing that comes together in a couple of minutes. The only real technique is the order of addition, which the original gets right and is worth respecting.
- Dissolve the dry seasonings firstSalt, sugar and cayenne go into the acid before the cream so they dissolve rather than sitting as grit in a thick base. Once the cream is in they disperse much more slowly, so it is worth getting them into the liquid first.
- Add the acid to the cream graduallyCombine gently -- A cup of cream against three tablespoons of acid can thicken and slightly curdle if the two are shocked together. The original adds the cream to the acid mixture; do it gradually, stirring as you go, and it will stay smooth.
- What "sour cream" meantPeriod sour cream was generally cream left to sour naturally, thinner and sharper than the modern product. Commercial cultured sour cream works directly; creme fraiche gives a closer texture and is less prone to breaking.
- CayenneAn eighth of a teaspoon in a cup of dressing is noticeable but not aggressive. Heat varies a good deal between jars, so start with less if you are unsure of yours.
- VinegarThe recipe does not specify; cider or white wine vinegar at the usual table strength suits it. Distilled white vinegar will give a sharper, flatter result.
- "Set on the ice"The ice chest, the period equivalent of the refrigerator. Chilling it before serving improves it; the recipe simply says to hold it there until needed.
- Yield and keepingAbout a cup and a quarter, enough for a large bowl of vegetable salad serving six to eight. Keep it refrigerated and use within three or four days.
- What it suitsCucumber, shredded cabbage, cold beets, boiled potatoes and sliced tomatoes all take it well. It is too heavy for delicate leaf lettuce, which wilts under it.
Sour-cream dressings belong to a line of American salad sauces in which the fat came from dairy rather than emulsified oil and the acid did much of the seasoning. They were commonplace in households with a dairy connection, where cream that had turned in the pantry was a resource rather than a loss, and the technique is often associated with German and Central European settlers, who are said to have dressed cucumbers and cabbage this way as a matter of course. Butterick's household books were written for the readers of its dress patterns, aiming squarely at the middle-class housekeeper managing without much staff, and a dressing like this fits that brief exactly: no cooking, no emulsion to break, no eggs to spoil, and it uses up cream that would otherwise be thrown away. The instruction to set it on the ice suggests, though it cannot fix, a period when a block-ice refrigerator was standard equipment and refrigeration was still worth mentioning in a recipe.