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Sour Cream Dressing

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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. Combine sour cream, salt, and paprika in a bowl.

  2. Whip the mixture until thick.

  3. Stir in horseradish and onion juice if desired.

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

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, horseradish):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, horseradish. 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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