13 February 2011
 
Vic’s Blown Away Thousand Island Dressing

You'll be amazed at the bright flavor of homemade Thousand Island Dressing. The base mayonaise isn’t bad, either.

No shit. I have about had it with the epiphany about the crooks who are either running this country or shaking it down for the last dimes and quarters left under the couch cushions.
 
I am going to give the Bastards a rest today. I would write about the gun show out in Chantilly, since that was as strange as anything I have seen lately, the crowds surging as they do after acts of homicidal lunacy that make the red half of America afraid for their Second Amendment rights.
 
Instead, we are going to have a salad and cool down. Somebody told me they saw a dafodil poking up out of the dark soil moist with the snow melt. So maybe there is hope, even if things are falling apart.
 
Thinking about the salad I intend to have for lunch made me think of my college roomate J.T.’s family had a place in Alexandria Bay, a magnificent little place that had been the ruins of a stone boathouse on the property of one of the Great Houses on the Saint Lawrence that had fallen prey to the carnivores who were set lose in the previous Great Collapse of 1929, engineered by those carnivorous theives at Goldman Sachs.
 
You can look that one up. G-S founded a couple Ponzi-scheme derivatives named Shanandoah and Blue Ridge Securities, which drove the bubble of greed that resulted in the margin calls that caused the original Black Friday. You can look it up.
 
No one bailed them out, and it is remarkable that the firm survived. It took them almost eighty years on the nose to regain enough hubris and the capacity for rapacious conduct to nearly ruin the world again.
 
Hundreds of Great Houses went into decline as the families that owned them were suddenly bereft of the means to keep them, even pay taes on them. There was an old fellow in town who recalled working in the big house back in the day. He smiled over his beer at Cavalario’s night club one evening when we took the little Chris Craft speedboat over for drinks after dinner. “I polished door knobs. All week. When I finished, it was time to start again on Monday.”
 

(Boldt Castle from the boathouse before restoration. Photo 1974 Socotra.)
 
The place was just across the river from Heart Island, which made sort of a romantic vista. Millionaire George C. Boldt was the proprietor of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. He had set out to build a full-sized Rhineland-style castle on the island for his wife Louise.
 
Construction began in 1900 on the six-story, 120-room castle, complete with a drawbridge and Italian gardens. In 1904, though, everything came to a screeching halt.
 
Boldt telegrammed the Western Union in A-Bay and commanded the workers to “stop all construction.” Louise had died suddenly, and he wanted nothing more to do with the ultimate Valentine’s Day project. George never returned to Heart Island. It was vacant and incomplete for nearly three quarters of a century. When I had a chance to see it close up on a visit in 1974, I was pretty amazed. Cases of walnut paneling and molding were sitting exactly where they had been left in the moldering basement, and leaning against a parapet high up in the towers you could feel the stone move.
 
J.T. was quite the pirate, by the way, and in addition to a fair amount of fun and games with the Canadian and American authorities, anything after normal business hours on the island made it his own private place. island.

Since 1977, though, I think the owners millions of dollars have been invested in the restoration of the castle and the outlying structures, originally constructed to be scenic ruins harking to the Mouse Tower on the Rhine, and the palatial Yacht House on Wellesley Island.
 
Boldt is often considered the inventor of Thousand Island Dressing, the tasty condiment that makes healthy salads into something much more fun. Mayo, Catsup and sweet pickle relish are the main ingredients, but there is more to it.
 
Another George is involved, though. Some claim that T.I. Dressing actually was born in the little village of Clayton, one of America’s coolest little towns. A fishing guide named George LaLonde, Jr. used to take visiting swells from The City out to seek Black Bass and Northern Pike through the crystal waters of the St. Lawrence, and the deep hidden pools along the islands.
 
When he would bring the parties back to Clayton, his wife Sophia would serve what they called “shore dinners” with a different and unusual salad dressing each night. George was accustomed to dealing with the great and near-great of New York.


(Image from Thomas A. Edison’s “The Kiss” with Mae Irwin almost puckering up. 1896.)
 
One season, a prominent Broadway star named May Irwin (her on-screen kiss was a modest scandal for Thomas Alva Edison’s new-fangled movie technology) and her husband were in the party. May was a renowned cook and authoress in her own right and was particularly impressed with the dressing and asked George for the recipe.
 
Sophia was flattered by the request and willingly gave her the recipe, which later appeared in an Irwin cookbook under the name “Thousand Island Dressing” and on the menu at Ella Bertrand’s Herald Hotel, one of the most popular hotels in Clayton.
 
When she got back to New York, she reportedly gave the recipe to George  Boldt. Impressed with the texture and taste, he directed his Executive Chef Oscar Tschirky to put the dressing on the hotel’s menu. In so doing, Oscar of the Waldorf got credit for introducing the rich sweet-sour salad dressing to the world.
 
Allen and Susan Benas purchased the Herald Hotel in 1972, about the time I started to visit, and changed the name to the “Thousand Islands Inn.” Needless to say, Thousand Island Dressing is the “official” house dressing, and they sell it and the legend at the inn and on the Internet for six bucks and some change.
 
My pal Sarah One is from Clayton, at least sometimes, when she is not on the road with The Greatest Show on Earth, and she brought me back a bottle a couple summers ago. Sadly, almost the whole thing was lost when the fridge was left open in the pell-mell rush to get out of the house and go to Michigan. It was an ugly scene when I got back a week later to see the double door open, and the machine laboring valiantly to try to cool the apartment.
 
I had to throw everything out, and replaced it with some Kraft Thousand Island, which sucked so badly that I decided to make my own, like J.T. used to.

Being from A-Bay sometimes, he claimed that the dressing was invented on one of the Boldt yachts when the chef ran out of regular Italian dressing and had to improvise with what he had on hand. Bottles of that dressing claiming the Boldt provenance are now sold on Heart Island in the shadow of the castle. Ominously, that version is produced in Canada. In the old days, J.T. would have smuggled it over.

He had his own version, which he introduced to me as coming from his mother. He would ladle a couple big scoops of Hellman’s mayo into a bowl, add Heinz 57 catsup to color, and take spoonful of Heinz Sweet Pickle Relish and stir it up.

That was delicious on sandwiches, but is only the start of what ought to be something more.
Poking around, I have seen several variations on the theme. One comes from a postcard I bought in A-bay long ago:


(Post card with secret recipe. Well, maybe not so secret.)

The one above features chopped olives, something I would have eschewed in my youth, but now with fading sensitivity of the palate, seems sort of attractive.

Other variations include: oil and/or mayonnaise, eggs, vinegar, lemon juice, tomatoes (or chili sauce/Sriracha/catsup), finely chopped cucumbers, red pepper, onions, horseradish, garlic powder, and of course sweet or dill pickles and sometimes a bit of sugar.

Anyway, mayonnaise is always the base to the dressing, and you can pick what you want to mix in. Hellmans is fine, other heretics like that weirdly processed Miracle Whip (truth in advertsing, Mom was a Miracle Whip homemaker but I have evolved). In point of fact, but I have always hankered for the Real Deal, homemade mayo. I was suspicious about the drizzling oil thing and the whisky-whisky thing, and but  have discovered a simple way to do it with a blender or the four-cup Cuisinart processor that sits on my counter.

It takes less than ten minutes to process your own mayo as a base for whatever Thousand Island variation you like.  Try this to get to the perfect base:

Ingredients:
2 egg yolks
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon powdered mustard
1/8 teaspoon sugar
Pinch cayenne pepper
4 to 5 teaspoons lemon juice
1-1/2 cups olive or other salad oil
4 teaspoons hot water
 
Dirctions:
Place yolks, salt, mustard, surgar pepper and three teaspoons lemon juice in the business end of the Cuisinart with the metal chopping blade. Buzz fifteen seconds. Then, with the motor running, slowly drizzle into a quarter cup of extra virgin olive oil through the portal in the lid. As the mixture begins to thicken, continue adding oil in a steady stream, alternating with the hot water and remaining lemon juice. Stop motor and scrape mixture down from sides of the work bowl as needed.
 
I think you will like the mayo as it is, and then you can slather it over your own lettuce wedge with tomatoes and bacon bits (or Bacos for the more evolved).
 
Don’t stop with T.I. You can make all sorts of amazing things with the creamy base:

Russian Mayonnaise: mix in 1/4 cup black or red caviar, 1.2 cup sour cream and  a  tablespoon minced fresh dill.

Mustard Mayonnaise: mix in 4 teaspoons Dijon mustard, or two of Coleman’s screaming hot traditional English mustard.

Curry Mayonnaise: blend in 1 to 2 teaspoons curry powder.

I mostly just stick with the T. I version, out of either A-Bay or Clayton, depending on whether you are up or down the river.




Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
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