Sour cream and I met for the first time when I was a kid, and I can’t say I was impressed.
Most of what my parents cooked from their Chicago childhoods fit neatly into their families’ soul food traditions. Once a week we’d sit down to fried chicken, greens, black-eyed peas or baked beans, sweet potatoes and cornbread waiting patiently for its butter. The second our long Wisconsin winters gave way to the balmy 40F afternoons of spring, my parents would drag our grill outside, load it up with charcoal and light it up to cook ribs, brats, hotdogs for us kids and the occasional batch of chitlins.
But they also had a great love for Chicago’s eastern European food. To me, the most exotic thing on the grill every weekend was probably the polish sausage, as thick around as my little kid forearm, and firm enough to produce a satisfying snap once I bit into it. And every once in a while they’d go all out and make a beef stroganoff. My favorite part of beef stroganoff was the egg noodles that came nestled underneath – not the beef, which I found hard to chew, and definitely not the heavy, sour cream-based sauce. Why on earth would anyone want milk to taste like lemons? I thought, wiping my noodles off on the side of my plate like it was a bathroom towel.
Wisconsin is dairy country. Not the optimal place to launch a personal war on sour cream, which could sneak-attack at any time:on the chili I ordered at the college student union cafeteria. Tucked into the core of an otherwise delicious baked potato. The white crown of a plate of nachos. It’s a state full of cows and we were supposed to adore every single cow product. I loved ice-cream. I liked cheese on pizza. But sour cream was a gloopy, heavy step too far.
Yet the sour cream war was one I’d end up losing. The beginning of the end was probably when I developed a love for injera, the fermented bread that serves as the foundation below a pile of Ethiopian or Eritrean food. Its sponginess felt like throwing a surprise birthday party inside my mouth. But I really gravitated towards its sourness. The restaurants I ordered it from had massively different takes on how sour it should be, and I noticed myself gravitating towards increasingly sour versions. And then I fell in love with lemons themselves. I’d been missing out. They had the tartness I liked from the injera, which livened up anything from tea to a powdered sugar-dusted dutch baby to baked chicken.
It took a pandemic to turn me around on sour cream. In March 2020, when life slowed down and hanging out with other people felt about as risky as driving into a highway median at 80 mph, I basically stopped going outside. I’d been subsisting on work lunches and takeout, but with roughly 500% more time on my hands, I rediscovered cooking. At first I cooked my usual stuff. Childhood soul food. Skirt steak with lime. Black bean stew. But as Covid wore on and my boredom spiked, I bought cookbooks, borrowed more cookbooks from the library, and plunged into whole new worlds of cooking. I baked plantains with tomatoes, whipped up salt and pepper shrimp, and invented our household’s version of fried rice, swapping out pulled pork, salmon and bacon for different fried rice moods, and topping them all off with gochujang.
But in the back of our refrigerator lurked a tub of sour cream that might have been sitting there forever. Neither my husband nor I had any idea why we owned it. Maybe we were the sort of people who, after hours of drinking, decided to take the night up a notch by buying sour cream, and forgetting about it. Around that time I found a piecrust recipe that told me to put some sour cream in. After tasting the tender delicious results, I started adding sour cream to everything I baked, from pie to red velvet cake to homemade pita bread. Everything tasted richer and more moist. The heavy creaminess that I’d hated about it at first turned out to be the exact quality that changed the texture of baked goods for the better. I started shoveling the stuff into my recipes until my family got sick of it. But I was hooked.
Because of what it does to baked goods, I’ve allowed sour cream to crawl back into the rest of my life as well. I was so wrong! It’s not terrible! Now sour cream also hangs out on my baked potatoes and on top of my Super Bowl nachos, and I look at the tiny scoops of it that come on the side of all the food at my favorite Mexican restaurant with the joy other people probably reserve for newborn kids.
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In an era full of big issues like the still-going pandemic, climate crisis and rising levels of hate, I’ve learned to find happiness in smaller things. Thank you, sour cream, for bringing a little light to my days.