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Sour Cream Dressing

A dressing made with vinegar, sugar, butter, egg, sour cream, and flour, thickened over heat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Sour Cream Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. Combine vinegar, sugar, and butter in a saucepan.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  3. In a bowl, mix egg, sour cream, and flour into a smooth paste.

  4. Stir the paste into the boiling vinegar mixture.

  5. Cook until the dressing thickens.

Serve

  1. Use for cabbage and celery salad, or thin with sweet cream for lettuce.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Walnut + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Egg
Sets and thickens the dressing as it cooks, giving it body.
Sour cream
Adds tang and creaminess to the dressing.
Flour
Thickens the dressing so it coats the salad well.
Vinegar
Provides the sharp acidity that defines the dressing.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar with sweetness.

The step that matters

Stir the paste into the boiling vinegar mixture. Adding the egg and flour paste to boiling liquid can cause lumps or curdling if it is not stirred in steadily. Keeping the mixture moving helps it blend smoothly and thicken evenly.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, sugar, butter, egg, cream, flour):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits about as well
  3. Pistachiofits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, sugar, butter, egg, cream, flour. 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.

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