Thousand Island dressing

Did You Know?

• McDonald's Big Mac sauce is a variation on Thousand Island dressing.
• In-N-Out Burger's "spread" is based on Thousand Island dressing.
• In Germany, a similar salad dressing is called "American dressing".

History

No one knows for sure how Thousand Island dressing got its name, but plenty of stories point to the Thousand Islands region along the St. Lawrence River between the U.S. and Canada. One popular tale says Sophia LaLonde, the wife of a fishing guide from Clayton, New York, first made it for her husband George’s shore dinner. After tasting it, actress May Irwin supposedly asked for the recipe and then passed it along. Another story credits George Boldt, a wealthy summer resident who built Boldt Castle and owned the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

In 1894, after forgetting dressing for salads, he supposedly improvised with whatever was on hand and told the hotel’s maître d’hôtel, Oscar Tschirky, to put the result on the menu. A 1959 National Geographic article claimed Boldt’s chef actually developed it. Tschirky never mentioned the dressing in his own cookbook from that era, despite claims he helped introduce it at the Waldorf.

In 2010, University of Wisconsin sociologist Michael Bell and his students tried to pin down the dressing’s origins. They found that the story changed from village to village and island to island in the region. They also uncovered a third version: that the original recipe was based on French dressing, which matches a recipe in the 1965 edition of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook. None of these stories had written records to back them up; all seemed to rely on oral tradition.

Food & Wine magazine reported that the dressing was a traditional sauce in the Thousand Islands area in the late 1800s. Wealthy visitors took bottles back to New York City, including a version served at the Herald Hotel in Clayton, run by innkeeper Sophia Lelonde. Some food writers say Theo Rooms, a chef at Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel, invented it around the same time.

The earliest known printed mention of Thousand Island dressing appeared in October 1912, when “Thousand Island on lettuce” was a trendy dish in Kansas City. The first known recipe was published in another Kansas City paper. A syndicated column ran on December 26, 1912, in papers across Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Oklahoma, and other papers ran it in the new year. More recipes followed.

Ingredients

Thousand Island dressing is made from a base of mayonnaise and usually ketchup or tomato purée and chopped pickles. It can also include lemon juice, orange juice, paprika, Worcestershire sauce, mustard, vinegar, cream, chili sauce, olive oil, and hot sauce. It typically contains finely chopped ingredients such as onions, bell peppers, green olives, hard-boiled egg, parsley, pimento, chives, garlic, or chopped nuts like walnuts or chestnuts.