Home › Salads and Salad Dressings › Thousand Island Salad Dressing
Thousand Island Salad Dressing
1 cup mayonnaise
1 tablespoon chopped green
4 tablespoons chilli sauce pepper
1 tablespoon chives
3 tablespoons chopped red
3 tablespoons catchup pepper
1 teaspoon tarragon vinegar
1 teaspoon paprika
Add chilli sauce, chives, catchup, peppers, paprika and vinegar to mayonnaise.
A straightforward stir-together dressing from the era when Thousand Island was still a novelty rather than a bottled staple. Two of the ingredient names mean something different now than they did on the page.
- Chilli sauceThis is American-style tomato chili sauce — a thick, sweet-sour tomato relish sold beside the ketchup, closer to cocktail sauce than to anything hot. It is not sriracha, sambal or a Chinese chilli sauce, any of which would wreck the balance.
- CatchupSimply an older spelling of ketchup. With the chili sauce already present, the two together give the dressing its pink colour and most of its sugar.
- Red and green pepperSweet bell peppers, chopped fine; the red may equally be sweet red pepper or canned pimiento, drained and minced. Neither is a hot pepper. Blot the chopped peppers dry or the dressing will thin out as it stands.
- PaprikaA full teaspoon suggests a mild sweet paprika, used as much for colour as flavour. Smoked or hot paprika will dominate.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and easily made by steeping a few sprigs of tarragon in white wine vinegar for a week. Plain white wine vinegar plus a pinch of dried tarragon is a reasonable substitute; cider vinegar changes the character.
- MayonnaiseThe book may well assume a homemade mayonnaise, which tends to be looser than commercial jarred mayonnaise. If using the jarred kind, expect a stiffer dressing — slacken with a teaspoon or two of cream or vinegar.
- Resting and yieldMakes roughly a cup and three-quarters. Let it sit refrigerated for half an hour before serving so the paprika and peppers bleed into the base. Keep cold and use within three or four days; with homemade mayonnaise, within two.
- What is missingMany later versions fold in chopped hard-boiled egg, sweet pickle or olives. This one does not, and the result is smoother and sharper than the modern bottled product.
The dressing takes its name from the Thousand Islands, the archipelago in the St. Lawrence River along the New York–Ontario border, which was a fashionable summer resort area around the turn of the twentieth century. The origin story usually told — and it is tradition rather than documented fact — credits Sophia LaLonde, wife of a Clayton, New York fishing guide, who is said to have served it as a shore-dinner sauce, with the actress May Irwin passing the recipe along and hotelier George Boldt putting it on the Waldorf-Astoria menu. What is certain is that the dressing spread quickly through American cookbooks in the 1910s and 1920s: mayonnaise thinned and reddened with bottled tomato condiments was a cheap, quick way to dress up cold lettuce, shellfish or leftover meat, and it depended on the ready availability of commercial chili sauce and ketchup that the previous generation had made at home.