Ralph Herz
THOUSAND ISLAND
SALAD DRESSING
1 cup mayonnaise 1/4 cup olive oil Yolk 1 hard-boiled egg 2 teaspoons Tarragon vinegar 1 tablespoon olives chopped 1 tablespoon mashed pimentos 2 tablespoons chopped green peppers 1/3 cup chili sauce 1 teaspoon onion juice Put the cooked egg-yolk through a sieve, add to it gradually the olive oil and vinegar, stir until smooth, add mayonnaise, onion juice, olives, peppers, pimentos and last the chili sauce. Serve ice cold with white head lettuce and crisp crackers.
To make a perfect salad, there should be a "miser for vinegar, a spendthrift for oil, a wise man for salt and a madcap to mix them all together," is still a good rule to remember.
Yours sincerely, Ralph Herz
A straightforward emulsion-based dressing from a 1916 celebrity cookbook, workable as written apart from one proportion that deserves a second look.
- The chili sauce quantity1½ cups of chili sauce against 1 cup of mayonnaise would swamp the dressing and turn it thin and sweet; the surrounding measures are all in teaspoons and tablespoons. It is very likely a typesetting slip for ½ cup. Start with ½ cup and add more only if you want it redder and sharper.
- Chili sauce is not hot saucePeriod chili sauce means the thick, sweet-sour tomato relish sold beside the ketchup — tomatoes, onion, sweet pepper, vinegar, sugar, mild spice. A Louisiana-style pepper sauce or an Asian chilli sauce will not substitute.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or press a cut onion against the grater and collect what runs. One teaspoon is enough to perfume the whole bowl.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, but easily made by steeping a few bruised tarragon sprigs in white wine vinegar for a week. Plain white wine vinegar plus a pinch of dried tarragon is an acceptable stand-in.
- The sieved yolk mattersRubbing the hard-boiled yolk through a sieve and then working in the oil drop by drop before anything else goes in is what keeps the dressing smooth rather than grainy. Adding the oil all at once leaves visible yolk crumbs suspended in the finished sauce.
- MayonnaiseIn 1916 this was often made at home from raw yolks, though jarred commercial mayonnaise was already on sale by then. Commercial mayonnaise is made with pasteurised egg and gives much the same result; if you make your own, use pasteurised eggs and keep the dressing refrigerated.
- Yield and keepingRoughly 2 cups if you use the reduced ½ cup of chili sauce suggested above (nearer 3 cups as printed), enough for eight to ten salads. It keeps three or four days covered in the refrigerator.
- "White head lettuce"Iceberg or a tightly furled butterhead, served in wedges or cups. The point is a cold, crisp, watery leaf against a heavy dressing — soft leaf lettuces collapse under it.
Thousand Island dressing takes its name from the Thousand Islands, the archipelago in the St. Lawrence River between New York State and Ontario that was a fashionable summer resort at the turn of the twentieth century. Its origin is traditional rather than documented: the story generally told credits a fishing guide's wife in the Clayton, New York area, whose sauce was said to have been passed by the actress May Irwin to the hotelier George Boldt and thence onto the menu at the Waldorf-Astoria. Whatever the truth, the dressing was new and modish when Ralph Herz — a stage comedian and musical-comedy player of the 1900s and 1910s — contributed it to this collection of recipes from theatre people, which is exactly the sort of thing such a book was for: a familiar name attached to something a hostess could put on the table that season. The proverb Herz signs off with, about the miser, the spendthrift, the wise man and the madcap, is an old saw on salad-making usually traced to Spanish sources and repeated in English cookbooks throughout the nineteenth century.