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Thousand Island Dressing
1¼ cups Mazola Mayonnaise 1/4 cup Chili sauce 1/2 teaspoon scraped onion 1 tablespoon minced pickle 1 2 tablespoons chopped, stuffed olives 1 hard boiled egg, 1/2 cup whipped cream chopped fine Combine and use with any plain green or vegetable salad.
A promotional booklet dressing, typeset badly enough that two ingredient lines have collided. Read it as a mayonnaise base lightened with whipped cream, which is what separates it from the bottled version sold today.
- The olive quantityThe olive line still runs together as "1 2 tablespoons chopped, stuffed olives"; read it as 1 to 2 tablespoons of chopped stuffed olives. Start with one tablespoon and add the second to taste.
- Mazola MayonnaiseA branded corn-oil mayonnaise sold when this booklet was printed and no longer generally available in US supermarkets. Any good commercial mayonnaise works, or homemade if you prefer; corn oil gives a more neutral base than an olive-oil mayonnaise.
- Whipped cream, unsweetenedWhip 1/2 cup heavy cream to soft peaks and fold it in last, gently, or the mixture deflates into thin pink sauce. This is the step that dates the recipe and the one worth keeping: it makes a dressing noticeably lighter than anything from a bottle.
- Chili sauce is not hot sauceAmerican chili sauce of this period is a thick, sweet-tart tomato condiment closer to ketchup with more spice and often bits of pepper and onion. Sriracha or a chile paste will wreck the balance.
- Scraped onionHalve an onion and scrape the cut face with a spoon or the back of a knife to collect juice and pulp without fibre. Half a teaspoon is right; grated onion is an acceptable substitute, minced onion is not.
- Yield and keepingAbout two cups, enough for eight to ten salad servings. Because of the cream and the chopped egg it will not hold like bottled dressing, so make it the day it is served and keep it cold.
Thousand Island dressing takes its name from the cluster of islands in the St. Lawrence River between New York and Ontario, a fashionable resort district around the turn of the twentieth century. Its origin is traditional rather than documented: the story most often repeated credits Sophia LaLonde, wife of a local fishing guide, with the original sauce, passed to the actress May Irwin and thence to George Boldt of the Waldorf-Astoria, whose maître d'hôtel Oscar Tschirky is said to have put it on the hotel menu. What can be verified is that the dressing spread through American recipe books in the 1910s and 1920s, and that it appears here for a commercial reason: booklets like this one were issued by manufacturers to sell a product, in this case Mazola corn oil and the mayonnaise made from it.