Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Cream Dressing for Cucumber Salad
Cream Dressing for Cucumber Salad
To make this salad a success have some sour cream. Take five tablespoonfuls of sour cream, two tablespoonfuls of vinegar, half a teaspoonful of paprika, one pinch of salt and half a teaspoonful of hashed up chives; mix it well, so that the paprika does not form little balls. When well mixed, add it to the cucumbers, and serve.
A four-ingredient dressing that lives or dies on the cream and on how much water the cucumbers give up. A few notes on translating it to a modern refrigerator.
- Sour cream then and nowIn the 1890s sour cream would often have been sweet cream left to sour naturally, likely thinner and sharper than the cultured tub sold today. Cultured sour cream works directly; if it seems stiff, slacken it with a spoonful of milk before adding the vinegar. Creme fraiche is milder in acid.
- QuantitiesFive tablespoons of cream to two of vinegar is a sharp dressing by modern taste, roughly a 2.5:1 ratio. It is calibrated for cucumbers that will release water and dilute it. Start with one tablespoon of vinegar and adjust after the dressing has met the cucumbers.
- The vinegarNo type is specified. Distilled white vinegar is harsher than a wine or cider vinegar, either of which gives a softer result.
- Paprika without lumpsThe one instruction the recipe insists on. Whisk the paprika into the vinegar first, where it disperses, then stir that into the cream. Added dry to cold cream it clumps and stays clumped.
- Draining the cucumbersThe recipe gives no instruction for the cucumbers themselves. Slicing them thin, salting lightly, standing twenty minutes and pressing out the liquid keeps the cream from thinning to a puddle.
- Chives"Hashed up" means finely minced. Half a teaspoon is modest and can be doubled to taste; dried chives are a poor substitute here since there is no cooking to revive them.
- Yield and timingAbout seven tablespoons, a scant half cup, of dressing. Dress at the last moment and serve cold; it does not hold.
Cucumbers in soured cream belong to the Central and Eastern European table long before they reached a Fifth Avenue hotel, appearing in German, Polish and Hungarian kitchens as Gurkensalat and its cousins. Sour cream in the 1890s came out of a dairy economy without reliable refrigeration, where cream soured whether you wanted it to or not, and it was a natural base for dressings and sauces. The recipe's flat opening line, that the salad depends on having some sour cream, is the whole argument: everything else in it is seasoning.