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Thousand Island Dressing (T powdered sugar t salt level)
2 t powdered sugar 1 t salt (level) 1 t mustard (scant) 1/2 t paprika 1 egg, beaten 1 can Mazola (small size) 4 T lemon juice Have bowl, beater and ingredients ice cold. To sugar, salt, mustard and paprika add beaten egg. Add the Mazola oil 1 tablespoon at a time until half of can is used. Add the lemon juice also 1 tablespoon at a time. Then alternate with the rest of the oil. Keep beating all the time with beater. Add Chili Sauce and whipped cream.
This is a hand-beaten corn-oil mayonnaise with chili sauce and whipped cream folded in at the end. The abbreviations and the can size are the puzzles, but the raw egg is the reason it cannot be recommended as printed.
- Why the cautionThe egg is beaten in raw and never heated at any point; the finished dressing is then diluted with whipped cream, which lowers the acidity that would otherwise inhibit bacterial growth. A shell egg carrying Salmonella in an uncooked emulsion that is thinned with dairy and held at refrigerator temperature is a documented risk, not a theoretical one. Use a current recipe for Thousand Island if you want to make it.
- No measured acid ratioFour tablespoons of lemon juice against roughly a cup of oil, an egg and an unspecified amount of chili sauce and cream gives no reliable pH. Recipes that rely on acid to control pathogens in an uncooked egg product need a stated ratio and a stated holding time; this one has neither.
- T and tCapital T is a tablespoon, lower-case t a teaspoon; the recipe's own instruction to add the oil "1 tablespoon at a time" confirms the reading. "Scant" means slightly under a level measure, "level" means struck flat with a knife.
- A small can of MazolaMazola was sold in tins as well as bottles. The small tin was probably around a pint, which would put half a can at roughly a cup of oil, going in a tablespoon at a time; the exact size is not certain.
- Powdered sugarProbably confectioners' sugar, though in cookbooks of this vintage "powdered" sometimes meant simply a fine granulated sugar. The quantity is small, so it is seasoning rather than sweetening.
- Chili sauceAmerican bottled chili sauce of this period is a thick, sweet-sour tomato relish closer to cocktail sauce than to anything hot. It is what gives the dressing its colour and much of its character.
- Missing quantitiesThe last line gives no amounts at all for the chili sauce or the whipped cream, so both are left to the cook's judgement.
Thousand Island dressing is named for the archipelago in the St. Lawrence River between New York and Ontario, and its origin is traditional rather than documented: the story usually told credits a fishing guide's wife, Sophia LaLonde of Clayton, New York, with the sauce, and the actress May Irwin with carrying it to the Waldorf-Astoria, where hotelier George Boldt — who kept a summer castle in the islands — put it on the menu. What is verifiable is the dressing's spread through American church and club cookbooks in the 1910s and 1920s, exactly where this one sits. The recipe's real period marker is the branded tin of Mazola: corn oil reached American grocers in the early 1910s, and it made hand-beaten mayonnaise cheap enough to be within easy reach of a home cook.