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Thousand Island Salad Dressing
1 cup mayonnaise 4 tablespoons chilli sauce 1 tablespoon chives 3 tablespoons catchup 1 teaspoon tarragon vinegar 1 tablespoon chopped green pepper 3 tablespoons chopped red pepper 1 teaspoon paprika Add chilli sauce, chives, catchup, peppers, paprika and vinegar to mayonnaise.
A straightforward stir-together dressing whose only real question marks are the period ingredient names. Everything is mixed cold; nothing is cooked.
- Chilli sauceIn American cookbooks of this era this means the thick, sweet-sour tomato relish sold in bottles alongside ketchup, not a hot pepper sauce. Use a tomato-based chili sauce of the Heinz type; a spoonful of sriracha is not a substitute.
- CatchupAn older spelling of ketchup. Unless a recipe specifies mushroom or walnut catchup, tomato ketchup is meant.
- Red pepperThree tablespoons chopped indicates sweet red pepper or drained canned pimiento, not cayenne. Pimiento gives the softer texture and slight sweetness typical of the period.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, though often only in larger markets. Cider or white wine vinegar works; a sprig of tarragon left in a few tablespoons of white wine vinegar for a day or two gives a closer flavor.
- ChivesA tablespoon of fresh chives, finely snipped. Dried chives contribute almost nothing here and can be left out in favor of a little finely minced scallion green.
- MayonnaiseA cup of commercial mayonnaise gives a stable dressing that keeps. If you make your own with raw yolks, treat the dressing as perishable and use it within a day or two.
- Rest before servingChill at least half an hour. The pepper and chive flavors need time to move into the mayonnaise, and freshly mixed it tastes mostly of ketchup.
- YieldClose to one and three-quarter cups (a cup of mayonnaise plus some thirteen tablespoons of additions), enough to dress ten to twelve salad servings. It is thick enough to spoon over wedges of iceberg or halved hard-cooked eggs rather than toss with delicate greens.
Thousand Island dressing takes its name from the cluster of islands in the St. Lawrence River along the New York and Ontario border, a fashionable resort area around the turn of the twentieth century. The origin story usually told credits a fishing guide's wife in the region, whose sauce was supposedly carried to New York hotel tables by a summering actress; the details are traditional rather than documented, and the dressing is also frequently traced to hotel kitchens of the same period. What is clear is that it belongs to a large family of American mayonnaise dressings tinted and flavored with bottled tomato sauces, which spread as commercial mayonnaise and bottled chili sauce became pantry staples in the early decades of the twentieth century. Its appearance here with no explanation offered suggests it had already entered ordinary home use.