Thousand Island dressing

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Thousand Island dressing on a salad

Thousand Island dressing is a salad dressing (a variant of Russian dressing), commonly made of mayonnaise, ketchup, Tabasco sauce and finely chopped vegetables, most often pickles, onions, bell peppers, and green olives; chopped hard-boiled egg is also common.

Origins

There are multiple conflicting stories about its origins:

• A fishing guide's wife, Sophie Lalonde, gave the recipe to an actress, who in turn gave it to another Thousand Islands summer resident, George Boldt, who was building the unfinished Boldt Castle in the area. Boldt, as proprietor of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, instructed the hotel's maître d'hôtel, Oscar Tschirky, to put the dressing on the menu.^[1]
• Sophia LaLonde invented it at Chicago's Blackstone Hotel in 1910^[2] substituting mayonnaise for the yogurt used in Russian dressing, and added pickle relish, chives and sometimes chopped hard-boiled eggs. The dressing was popularized by one of her dinner guests, actress May Irwin, who gave the condiment its name, after LaLonde's home, the Thousand Islands region of upstate New York and Eastern Ontario.
• The name refers to the multitude of small specks of pickle usually found in the dressing.

Uses

Thousand Island dressing is sometimes used as an ingredient in a Reuben sandwich.

In the 1950s, Thousand Island dressing became a standard condiment, used on sandwiches and salads alike. It is widely used in fast-food restaurants in America. It is commonly used on hamburgers;^[3] in particular, McDonald's Big Mac sauce is a form of Thousand Island Dressing with mustard.^[4] On In-N-Out Burger's secret menu, "Animal Style" burgers and fries use Thousand Island dressing in addition to grilled onions and melted cheese.

References