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Sour Cream Salad Dressing
Stir slowly three tablespoonfuls of tarragon vinegar into one cupful of thick sour cream; add one-half teaspoonful of salt, one-half teaspoonful of powdered sugar, and a dash of cayenne.
A four-ingredient dressing that depends entirely on the cream being thick enough to hold the acid. Everything else is seasoning.
- Add the vinegar slowlyThis is the hinge. The recipe's own instruction is to stir it in slowly, and with three tablespoons going into one cup of cream that matters: a thin cream can turn grainy or watery if the acid goes in all at once. Dribble it in while stirring steadily and the dressing stays smooth and pourable.
- "Thick sour cream"In period usage this generally meant sweet cream left to sour naturally, which set to a heavy, spoonable consistency. Full-fat cultured sour cream is the right modern substitute; light or reduced-fat versions carry too much water and will thin out badly once the vinegar goes in.
- Tarragon vinegarA white wine vinegar steeped with tarragon, still sold and easy to make by dropping a few sprigs into a bottle of white wine vinegar for a week. Plain white wine vinegar plus a teaspoon of finely chopped fresh tarragon gets close.
- Powdered sugarIn period books this generally means sugar ground finer than granulated so that it dissolves quickly in a cold mixture, rather than modern starch-blended confectioners' sugar. Granulated sugar works but wants a minute of stirring to disappear.
- CayenneA dash means a couple of pinches at most. It is there for warmth behind the sourness rather than heat you can identify.
- Yield and useAbout a cup and a quarter, depending on how generously it is spooned out. It suits sturdy salads -- cucumber, sliced tomato, cold potato, shredded cabbage, cold beets -- better than delicate leaf lettuce.
- KeepingRefrigerate and use within three or four days. If it stiffens as it stands, loosen it with a spoonful of cream rather than more vinegar.
Sour cream dressings are strongly associated with the Central and Eastern European kitchen, where cucumbers and cabbage were commonly dressed this way, and they became more visible in American cookery over the nineteenth century as those immigrant communities settled. Their appearance in turn-of-the-century compilations also reflects simple domestic arithmetic: households that took whole milk and skimmed their own cream would have had cream souring on hand, and a dressing was one agreeable way to use it. The tarragon vinegar points toward the French vinaigrette tradition that fashionable American cookery was absorbing, and flavored vinegars were a familiar pantry item in the period, often made at home from garden herbs.