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Thousand Island French Dressing
Put in small jar 1 1/4 teaspoons salt 1/3 teaspoon pepper Few grains cayenne 1/2 cup salad oil 2 tablespoons vinegar 1/4 cup chili sauce 1/2 teaspoon table sauce. Just before serving add 1/3 cup cream beaten stiff, and shake thoroughly.
A shaken vinaigrette rather than the mayonnaise-based dressing sold under this name today, lightened at the last moment with whipped cream. The timing of that addition is the whole recipe.
- Add the cream last, and mean itWhipped cream folded or shaken into an acidic dressing begins to deflate and weep within minutes. Mix and chill the oil-vinegar base ahead; whip the cream and shake it in immediately before the dressing goes to the table.
- "Table sauce"A bottled commercial condiment of the Worcestershire and Harvey's family. Worcestershire sauce is the direct substitute at the same half teaspoon; it is there for depth, not heat.
- Chili sauce is not hot sauceIn American cookbooks of this period chili sauce means a thick, sweet-sharp tomato relish with onion and vinegar, closer to ketchup than to anything from a dropper bottle. Using a modern chili paste or Sriracha will overwhelm the quarter cup called for.
- Salad oilA neutral refined oil - cottonseed or corn at the time, canola or sunflower now. Olive oil will read as assertive against the cream.
- VinegarUnspecified, which in American practice of this period would most likely mean plain white or cider vinegar at roughly 5 percent acidity. Two tablespoons to half a cup of oil is a sharp 1:4 ratio; the cream is what tames it.
- Shaking, not blendingThis is a temporary emulsion with no egg or mustard to hold it. Expect it to separate on standing and shake again; do not put it through a blender, which will only break the whipped cream down faster.
- YieldAbout a cup and a half once the cream is in.
- Cayenne"Few grains" is a genuine pinch - somewhere under an eighth of a teaspoon. Ground cayenne keeps its heat far better than its aroma, so taste rather than trusting an old jar.
Thousand Island dressing takes its name from the archipelago in the St. Lawrence River between New York State and Ontario, a fashionable summer resort district in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its invention is traditionally credited to a fishing guide's wife in the region, Sophia LaLonde, whose sauce is said to have been carried into wider circulation by the actress May Irwin and the hotelier George Boldt; none of this is firmly documented, and the story reached print long after the fact. What is clear from cookbooks of the 1910s and 1920s is that the name attached loosely to any pink dressing built on tomato-based chili sauce, and that versions like this one, thinned with a plain oil-and-vinegar base and enriched with whipped cream rather than mayonnaise, were in circulation alongside the thick emulsion that later took over the name. Whipped cream in a savoury dressing was a favourite luncheon touch of the period - light, showy, and requiring the hostess to finish the dish at the last minute.