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Salad

Sour-Cream Salad Dressing

A creamy dressing made with sour cream, salt, white pepper, paprika, and optional horseradish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and horseradish work together. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 483 recipes. Both carry octanal, which smells fat, soap. The science ↓

Sour-Cream Salad Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a bowl, combine sour cream, salt, white pepper, and paprika.

  2. Beat the mixture until thick and light using a hand mixer.

  3. If desired, fold in the grated horseradish.

  4. Serve immediately or refrigerate until ready to use.

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

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  2. White pepper + horseradishtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together232 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  3. Cream + white peppertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,439 recipes

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 base, tanginess and body of the dressing.
Grated horseradish
Adds sharp heat and pungency that cuts through the richness of the cream.

The step that matters

Beat the mixture until thick and light. Beating incorporates air and firms the sour cream's texture, so the dressing clings to greens instead of running. Over-beating a cultured cream can thin it, so stop once it thickens.

Swap the horseradish

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

  1. Potatofits about as well
  2. Horseradishthe original
  3. Leekfits less well
  4. Onionfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, white pepper. 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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