creaminess

What do Americans eat on everything?  You thought of ketchup, right?  This has become a pretty widespread stereotype, and one that I actually take a bit of umbrage with.  Maybe I'm just being dense, but the only things I can think of the Americans regularly eat with ketchup are french fries, cheeseburgers, and hot dogs.  I mean you could throw meatloaf on that list, but then I think you're just trying too hard.  Moving on, let's consider another question: what do Russians eat on everything?  You probably don't have an answer.  Well, it's sour cream.

Not kidding.

Now let's get a few things straight.  First, I'm clearly exaggerating; Russians don't eat sour cream on everything.  But they do eat a lot of it.  Second, this is in no shape or form a criticism.  I quite like sour cream and think it's an essential component of many Russian dishes.  I actually think sour cream gets a bad rap stateside, and I think it's because the sour cream people have a terrible PR department.  I mean come on, sour cream?  Cream is a dodgy enough proposition to begin with, but you chose to modify it with an adjective typically used to describe something that's gone bad?

The Russian PR team, by contrast, was wise enough to avoid this trap.  The Russian word for sour cream is cметана (smetana).  Go ahead, try it out.  Say it a few times.  Sounds nice, right?  I know.  Already, you can feel your old prejudices against sour cream fading away, right?  You're welcome.  Anyways, that's about all I have to say about sour cream, so I'll leave you with a list of things I've eaten with sour cream.

Things I've eaten with sour cream:

• Pelmeni (little Russian dumplings)
• Borsch
• Vegetable soup
• Hot cabbage (in the morning no less--the sour cream saved me)
• Bliniy (kind of like crepes)
• Potatoes
• Vegetable salad
• Potato salad
• Curds
• Apples
• Spam spam spam spam eggs sausage bacon and spam spam spam sour cream spam spam and spam

Two points to everyone who got that reference.  The rest of you, educate yourselves!