Home › Salads and Salad Dressings › Russian Dressing
Russian Dressing
Take mayonnaise enough for 6 people; add 2 teaspoons chili sauce, 1 can pimentos chopped fine, and if desired a dash of grated cheese.
A four-line formula that assumes you already have mayonnaise on hand and know how much a salad for six takes. The quantities below fill in what the original leaves to the cook's judgment.
- "Mayonnaise enough for 6 people"Reckon about 1 cup, which dresses roughly 8-10 cups of greens or a large bowl of chilled shellfish. The rest of the recipe scales from that: it is a ratio, not a fixed measure.
- Chili sauceNot a hot sauce. In American cookbooks of this period chili sauce means the thick, sweet-sour bottled tomato relish of the Heinz type, closer to a chunky ketchup with onion and vinegar. Two teaspoons in a cup of mayonnaise is a mild tint; later versions of this dressing are often more generous.
- A can of pimentosTins ran small, commonly around 4 oz drained, which is two or three whole roasted red peppers. Drain them well and blot dry before chopping, or the dressing will thin and weep as it stands.
- Grated cheeseThe optional "dash" implies a dry cheese hard enough to grate fine, such as Parmesan or an aged cheddar. Start with a tablespoon; more than that turns a dressing into a dip.
- Homemade versus jarredThe recipe does not say which is meant. Commercial mayonnaise is generally the more stable emulsion and takes the additions without breaking; if you make your own, fold the pimentos in at the end rather than beating them through.
- Resting and keepingGive it 30 minutes in the refrigerator so the pimento flavor spreads. It keeps two or three days covered; beyond that the peppers begin to dominate and the mayonnaise loosens.
- What to put it onA dressing of this thickness suits cold shellfish, hard-boiled eggs, celery root, or a wedge of head lettuce better than tender leaves, which it flattens.
Russian dressing is an American invention of the early twentieth century, not a Russian one; the name is generally traced to early versions that included caviar, which was the era's shorthand for anything Russian. By the time promotional cookbooks like this one were printing it, the caviar had dropped away and the formula had settled into mayonnaise plus a red tomato condiment, with chopped pimento, chives, or grated cheese as the variable. Its near-twin, Thousand Island, is often distinguished by the use of pickle or relish where this uses sweet pepper, though the line between them is blurry, since Thousand Island recipes frequently include pimento too. The recipe's brevity is characteristic of the genre: a home cook was expected to have a bottle of chili sauce and a tin of pimentos in the cupboard, both relatively new conveniences of the canning industry, and to need no instruction beyond a ratio.