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Salad

Sour Cream Salad Dressing

A hot sour cream dressing mixed with eggs, vinegar, and seasonings, poured over shredded cabbage and chilled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and cabbage match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,645 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Sour Cream Salad Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. Heat the sour cream and vinegar together in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the beaten eggs and let the mixture come to a boil.

  3. Add the salt, sugar, mustard, and cayenne pepper.

Assemble and serve

  1. Pour the hot dressing over the shredded cabbage.

  2. Chill the salad before serving.

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. Mustard + cabbagetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,645 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + cabbagetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,081 recipes

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

  3. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sour cream
Adds richness and a creamy body to the dressing.
Eggs
Thicken the dressing as they cook and set in the hot mixture.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the dressing a sharp, tangy flavour.
Cabbage
Forms the base of the salad and absorbs the warm dressing.

The step that matters

Letting the egg mixture come to a boil. Eggs thicken as they heat, but overheating can curdle them into lumps. Bringing the mixture to a boil while stirring is needed to cook the eggs enough to thicken the dressing.

Swap the cabbage

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

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

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