Creamy Dill Dressing

The tomatoes are finally turning — the first blush of red on the largest one, a celebrity tomato that I have been watching since April with the attentiveness of a mother monitoring a fever. Two more days. Maybe three. The anticipation of a ripe tomato is one of the few pure pleasures available to me this summer, and I am not ashamed to admit that I talk to this tomato. I tell it it's doing well. I tell it I'm proud. I tell it things I would tell Marvin if Marvin could understand them, which is perhaps why I talk to the tomato — it absorbs the words without judgment or confusion, and it turns red regardless, which is more than I can say for most conversations in this house.

Rebecca is spending the summer in the city, writing a paper on Chekhov's "Three Sisters" and the concept of waiting — waiting for Moscow, waiting for meaning, waiting for the life you were promised to actually begin. She says the quarantine has given her new insight into the play. "The sisters wait for Moscow and Moscow never comes," she told me on the phone. "We're all waiting for Moscow now." I said, "Moscow is a metaphor. Your grandmother's brisket is not a metaphor. Come get your brisket." She laughed. She came the following Sunday — masked, distant, sitting on the porch while I sat inside — and took the brisket and the challah and the rugelach, and the exchange was wordless and masked and the most normal thing I had done in weeks.

I made a cold cucumber soup — yogurt, cucumber, dill, garlic, lemon. It's a summer soup, served chilled, the kind of food that doesn't heat up the kitchen, which matters in July when the kitchen is already tropical and the thought of turning on the oven is obscene. The soup is not Ashkenazi — it's more Mediterranean, more Miriam's influence — but it's delicious and it's cold and it's easy and sometimes easy is what you need. Not every meal has to be a statement. Some meals are just food. Some weeks are just weeks. This was one of them, and the ordinariness of it was a gift I didn't know I needed.

The cold cucumber soup I described — yogurt, cucumber, dill, garlic, lemon, nothing more — lives and dies by its dressing base, and this creamy dill preparation is exactly what I reach for when I want that flavor without the fuss of building it from scratch. It’s the kind of recipe that feels almost too simple to write down, which is precisely why I’m writing it down: because on the weeks when ordinariness is the gift, you want the recipe in front of you, no improvising required.

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 0 minutes | Total Time: 10 minutes (plus 30 minutes chilling) | Servings: 8

Ingredients

1 cup plain whole-milk yogurt
1/2 cup sour cream
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar
2 cloves garlic, minced
3 tablespoons fresh dill, finely chopped (or 1 tablespoon dried)
1 tablespoon fresh chives, chopped
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1–2 tablespoons cold water, to thin if needed

Instructions

Combine the base. In a medium bowl, whisk together the yogurt and sour cream until smooth and well blended.
Add acid and aromatics. Stir in the lemon juice, white wine vinegar, and minced garlic. Mix until fully incorporated.
Fold in the herbs. Add the fresh dill and chives, stirring gently to distribute evenly throughout the dressing.
Season. Add salt and pepper, taste, and adjust seasoning as needed. If the dressing feels thicker than you’d like, whisk in cold water one tablespoon at a time until it reaches your preferred consistency.
Chill before serving. Transfer to a jar or covered bowl and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes. This allows the garlic and dill to mellow and the flavors to come together.
Serve or use as a soup base. Use as a salad dressing, a dip for vegetables, or thin further with cucumber juice and additional cold water to serve as a chilled cucumber soup alongside sliced cucumber and a drizzle of olive oil.

Nutrition (per serving)

Creamy Dill Dressing — The Soup That Didn’t Need to Be a Statement