Salad Days – Steakhouse Thousand Island Dressing

Everywhere you turn you can find innovative and creative ways to cook and serve food.  TV and magazines, not to mention the internet, are all full of cooking shows and ideas for new food dishes, or at least new takes on old dishes.  But sometimes old school just hits the spot.  That’s how we feel about Thousand Island Dressing.  It is the perfect “secret sauce” to use on burgers, it is yummy as a dip for french fries or especially fried pickle chips or onion strings, lovely served with baby cocktail shrimp, and of course pretty hard to beat on some crisp lettuce as an accompaniment to a really good steak.

What you might not know about Thousand Island Dressing is how it got it’s name.  I had always heard that it was called Thousand Island because all the little bits of pickle relish and onion looked like little islands floating in the sea of pink goodness.  But upon further research it seems this classic and very famous salad dressing actually got it’s beginnings in upstate New York in a region called 1000 Islands.  A local fishing guide’s wife, Sophia LaLonde, prepared the delightful salad dressing as a part the “shore dinner” that she served the clients of her husband.  Some well known and socially connected people of the day ate Sophia’s dressing and requested her recipe which eventually made it’s way on to the menu at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in NYC.  That was it’s big debut and the rest, as they say, is history.

You can make this version of the classic dressing with things you no doubt already have in your kitchen.  If you do, you won’t be sorry, we are sure of that!

Steakhouse Thousand Island Dressing

2/3 cup mayonnaise (preferably a good quality full fat mayo like Best Foods or Hellman’s)
1/3 cup ketchup (Heinz is our choice)
2 tablespoons sweet pickle relish
1/4 cup of dill pickle relish
1/4 of a sweet onion very finely minced or grated

Stir all the ingredients together and serve.  Or make this in advance and store in the refrigerator in a glass jar for up to 1 month (if it lasts that long 🙂 )