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Sour Cream Dressing

A creamy dressing made with sour cream, lemon juice, vinegar, mustard, salt, pepper, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Sour Cream Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Beat the sour cream with an egg beater until smooth, thick, and light.

  2. Mix the salt, pepper, mustard, lemon juice, vinegar, and sugar together.

  3. Gradually add the mixture to the cream while continuing to beat.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  5. Mustard + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,816 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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 rich texture of the dressing.
Lemon juice
Adds bright acidity that lifts the flavor of the cream.
Vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that balances the richness of the sour cream.
Sugar
Adds a little sweetness to balance the sharpness of the acids.
Mixed mustard
Adds a pungent, savory flavor and helps the dressing hold together.

The step that matters

Gradually add the mixture to the cream while continuing to beat. Sour cream is a fat-in-water emulsion, and adding acidic liquid all at once can thin it or cause it to curdle. Adding it slowly while beating lets the acid blend evenly, keeping the dressing smooth and thick.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, mustard, cream, vinegar, sugar):

  1. Limefits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Cherryfits about as well
  4. Mangofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, mustard, cream, vinegar, sugar. 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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