Homemade Ranch Dressing

This highly popular salad dressing, also used as a dip, was developed in the 1950s by Steve Henson, founder of the Hidden Valley Ranch brand of dressings. This recipe is purely my own and I make no claim to it being the equivalent to the highly successful commercial brand, or any other brand, for that matter.

Ingredients

1/2 cup buttermilk (low fat is fine)
1 cup mayonnaise (reduced fat is fine)
1/4 cup sour cream (reduced fat is fine)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1/4 teaspoon sweet paprika
1 teaspoon dried chives
1/2 teaspoon dried dill
1 teaspoon onion powder
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon parsley
1/2 teaspoon ground mustard

Simply mix all the ingredients together very well. If it is still too thick, add a little more buttermilk to get it to the consistency you want. Chill well before serving.

I just mixed and chilled everything right in a measuring cup (then covered it with plastic wrap), which shows that everything together made about 2 1/4 cups of dressing.

WORD HISTORY:
Heap-This word goes back to Indo European "k(h)oup," which had the notion of "raised surface;" thus, "hill." This gave its Old Germanic offspring "houpaz/haupaz," which "seems" to have reduced the meaning from "hill" to the lesser, "pile or stack of something." ^ This gave Old English "heap," but with the likely pronunciation of "hee-ap," and with the same general meaning, but with the figurative sense of "many," including people. This then became "heep/hepe," before the modern version, which "likely" mimicked the old spelling by coincidence. There was also a verb form, "heapian," dating to Old English (and in other Germanic languages, too) meaning, "to pile things together, to collect into a stack/pile." Going back to Old English, there was a further underlying notion in some uses as, "something bad, something spoiled," and this notion has carried through with the word since those times, as "heap" has been used for places of human waste, "dung heap," and also places for trash, garbage, "trash heap," and who hasn't owned a beaten up, old car at some point, "a heap." The other Germanic languages have: German "Haufen," Low German Saxon "Huup," Dutch "hoop," Danish "hob" (meaning "crowd, mob"), Icelandic "hópur" ("crowd, group").

^ The Old Germanic form may well have retained the original meaning, but then its West Germanic offshoot reduced the meaning from "hill" to "pile, stack." The "main" West Germanic languages in modern times are: English, German, Low German, Dutch and Frisian. Further, and this bolsters the idea that "apparently" the lessening of the meaning to "pile/stack" was made in West Germanic, Old Norse borrowed the word from Low German or Frisian as "hópr;" thus, the modern Danish and Icelandic forms came from that borrowing, as Old Norse is their North Germanic ancestor.