I was just reading something about how the buttermilk we have available to us these days isn't really buttermilk, so it's suggested we make sour milk with vinegar or lemon juice instead: 1 tablespoon vinegar or lemon juice in a cup, and then fill it with milk to make a cup. Let it stand awhile to thicken. I personally don't think it's exactly the same thing, but I know what she meant about the commercial product being just too phony, and I'm going to dig out my buttermilk recipes and try them with home-soured milk. (Sounds yucky, but you know what I mean.)

This makes me think of my mother's sour cream sugar cookies that came from my grandmother. Oh! They were so good: very thin, 3 inch rounds with pinked edges, sparkling with a dusting of sugar. I can just about remember the wonderful flavor, and don't know if I will ever achieve it in combination with the texture.

When I was a kid, we drove out in the country to a dairy farm to buy the cream because they had to be made with heavy cream that sat until it was soured, and only unpasteurized cream would do this without going rotten first.

This is because cream available to us now is full of additives and treated for shelf life. Daisy Sour Cream (not their Light product) is pure 'cultured' cream, so that's probably the best we can hope for. Also, the butterfat is lower. Struggling with this problem, my mother's solution was to try adding extra butter, but it wasn't the same because commercial sour cream doesn't taste like real cream that has soured.


Grandma Bein's Sugar Cookies

1 1/2 cups sugar
1 cup butter (see notes)
2 eggs
1 cup sour cream (see note)
1 teaspoon baking soda dissolved in boiling water
1 teaspoon vanilla
Salt
Flour enough to roll thin

Cream the sugar and butter. Add the eggs and sour cream and mix well. Stir in the baking soda and vanilla. Mix in the salt, and then enough flour to make a sticky dough. Chill it several hours so it can be rolled without adding too much flour.

Roll very thin (use a stockinette on the rolling pin) and cut with a big round “pinked” edge cookie cutter or animal shapes. Sprinkle with sugar.
Bake at 375 degrees till slightly brown. My mother, Louise, baked these in huge batches, covering the round kitchen table with overlapped rows of cookies and she froze them in gallon size glass jars, but gave a lot away. She would have Dutch Smith come over to help with the sugaring and taking the cookies off the sheets.

Note: try adding 1/4 cup extra butter if you don't have farm cream.