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Thousand Island Dressing (Mrs H A Taylor egg yolks C)
Mrs. H. A. Taylor. 3 egg yolks ½ C vinegar 1¾ Coil Beat egg yolks. Add oil slowly and beat continuously to form a mayonnaise. Add vinegar last, slowly, beating thoroughly, so it will not "break" Then add: 1 C Chili Sauce 1/2 onion minced 3 hard boiled eggs minced 2 pimentoes minced 1 green pepper minced Paprika and salt to taste Mrs. L. B. LaDouceur.
This makes about one quart. Keep in cool place.
A from-scratch mayonnaise turned into a chunky relish-style dressing, in the manner of a church-supper cookbook where every cook was expected to know how to build an emulsion.
- Abbreviations"C" is a cup throughout, and "Coil" in the ingredient list is oil. Quantities are given by volume, as was standard in community cookbooks of this era.
- The oil quantityThe printed page gives 1¾ cups of oil, as the text now reads. Three yolks will carry roughly 1½ to 2 cups of oil before the emulsion is saturated, so the amount is in the expected range.
- The vinegar looks highA cup and a half of vinegar against three yolks is far more acid than a standard mayonnaise takes, and would thin the emulsion drastically. Treat this figure as doubtful and add vinegar by taste, a spoonful at a time, rather than by the stated measure.
- Not letting it "break"This is the hinge of the recipe. Add the oil in a thin thread at first and keep beating without pause; if you rush it the yolks cannot take up the fat and the mixture separates into a greasy slick. Acid goes in at the end, also slowly, for the same reason.
- Chili sauceIn American cookbooks of this period this means the bottled sweet tomato relish sold beside ketchup, not a hot pepper sauce. The Heinz-style bottled chili sauce still on sale is essentially the same product; be aware that "chili sauce" now also labels hot and sweet Asian sauces, which are not what is wanted here.
- PimentoesJarred pimientos, that is, sweet red peppers roasted and peeled. Jarred roasted red peppers, drained and patted dry, substitute exactly.
- Raw yolksNothing in this dressing is cooked. If you are serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurized eggs in the shell or pasteurized yolks.
- Yield and keepingAbout a quart, as the original notes -- enough for a large gathering. "Keep in cool place" meant a cellar or icebox; refrigerate it, and because of the minced hard-boiled egg and fresh onion, use it within three or four days rather than treating it as a keeping relish.
Thousand Island dressing appears in American cookbooks from around the early twentieth century and is traditionally traced to the Thousand Islands region of the St. Lawrence River, where several competing origin stories place it among resort hotels and fishing guides' shore lunches; none is firmly documented. What is clear from a recipe like this one is the form the dressing took before bottled versions existed: a homemade mayonnaise, built by hand from yolks and oil, then loaded with minced hard-boiled egg, onion, green pepper and pimiento until it was closer to a relish than a sauce.