Skip to main content
Salad

Sour Cream Dressing

A creamy dressing made with sour cream, horseradish, salt, onion juice, and paprika.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Horseradish and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,784 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Sour Cream Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a bowl, combine the salt and paprika with the sour cream and whip until thick.

  2. Stir in the horseradish and onion juice.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Horseradish + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cream + oniontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,827 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  3. Cream + horseradishtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together483 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

Cream and onion barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,827 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sour cream
Provides the thick, creamy body and tangy base of the dressing.
Horseradish
Adds sharp, pungent heat that cuts through the richness of the cream.

The step that matters

Whip the sour cream until thick. Whipping incorporates air and thickens the cream so the dressing holds its body instead of running. Stopping too early leaves it thin, while over-whipping can make it grainy or separate.

Swap the horseradish

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, onion):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Chivefits about as well
  4. Horseradishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, onion. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Chicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipesTomato SaladTomato Salad179 recipesCold SlawCold Slaw160 recipes