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Russian Dressing
Measure 1/2 cup mayonnaise dressing, add 1/4 cup chili sauce 1 tablespoon pimiento cut in small pieces 1 tablespoon green pepper cut in small pieces and 1 tablespoon celery cut in small pieces, and mix thoroughly.
A five-minute cold sauce that depends entirely on what you mean by "chili sauce." Get that right and the rest is chopping.
- Chili sauce is not hot sauceIn an American cookbook of this period, chili sauce means a thick, sweet-sour tomato condiment in the ketchup family, sold in bottles and flecked with onion and pepper. Substituting a modern vinegar-and-capsicum hot sauce will wreck both texture and balance; plain ketchup with a splash of vinegar is closer than sriracha.
- Mayonnaise dressingMost likely mayonnaise made in the kitchen from yolks and oil, though bottled mayonnaise was already on sale by this date. Commercial jarred mayonnaise works in its place; it tends to be sweeter and firmer, so the finished dressing may come out a little stiffer.
- PimientoCanned or jarred sweet red pimiento peppers, drained and blotted. They are mild and already soft. Roasted red pepper from a jar is the nearest thing on a supermarket shelf.
- Cut in small piecesAim for a fine dice, about 1/8 inch. Anything larger and the vegetables slide off the salad instead of riding with the dressing.
- Green pepper and celeryBoth go in raw and stay crunchy. Because of that, the dressing does not hold well: after a day the pepper weeps and the celery softens. Make what you will use.
- YieldA little under a cup (1/2 cup mayonnaise, 1/4 cup chili sauce and three tablespoons of chopped vegetables), enough to dress a head of lettuce or four or five composed salads.
- Rest itHalf an hour in the refrigerator will take some of the raw edge off the green pepper. This is a suggestion rather than part of the original, which says only to mix thoroughly.
Russian dressing appears to be an American creation of the early twentieth century, and the name is usually explained by the caviar that featured in some early versions rather than by any Russian original -- though that explanation is tradition rather than documented fact. By the time Alice Bradley was writing, the caviar had largely dropped away from published versions and the formula was close to what appears here: mayonnaise reddened with bottled chili sauce and given crunch with chopped pimiento, green pepper and celery. That reliance on a commercial bottled condiment is itself a marker of the period, when packaged chili sauce and ketchup had become pantry staples and cookbooks were happy to build on them. The close relative, Thousand Island dressing, differs chiefly in leaning on pickle and chopped egg, and the two have long been confused with one another.