A-dressing a Mystery

BRIAN: If you’re just joining us, this is BackStory. Today on the show, we’ve been island-hopping across American history. For our final story today, we’re going to answer a question that’s been bugging me for years. Here it is. Why is Thousand Island dressing called Thousand Island dressing? ED: Oh, man. Thats heavy. [LAUGH] Now, the one thing that everybody seems to agree on is that this particular BackStory took placein the early 1900s and has something to do with the Thousand Islands region of the Saint Lawrence River, between New York State and OntarioCanada, as you know. But beyond that, the stories diverge.

Here’s one theory. A guy named Oscar Tschirky, the Maitre’d of New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, whipped up the dressing while working on his boss’s yacht. Tschirky and his boss, a guy named George Bold, were vacationing the Thousand Islands, and Tschirky apparently through some mayo in with some chopped up tomatoes, and voila, Thousand Island dressing was born.

PETER: Another theory has it that the inventor was actually a woman named Sophie LaLonde, the wife of a charter fishing captain who concocted the dressing not for salad, but rather for the fish that her husband’s clients had caught that day.

And, according to a third story, Thousand Island dressing was invented by an actress named May Irwin, famous for performing the first ever on-screen kiss in a 47-second Thomas Edison short. Several years after the kiss, she gave the recipe to a chef at Chicago’s Flagstone Hotel, where she was performing. Both of them had spent time at hotels in the Thousand Islands, and so named it after their favorite vacation spot.BRIAN: To figure out which of these theories is most credible, we called in someone who knows his way around food and history. Ben Davison is a historian here at the University of Virginia and a chef. Ben, thanks a lot for joining us. BEN DAVISON: Good to be here.

BRIAN: So what do you think? Which theory do you put your money on?BEN DAVISON: You know, if I had to make a guess, I think they’re probably all true in their own way.

PETER: Aww.

BEN DAVISON: No, no, no. It’s not a cop out. But if anything, I think the key factor is that this all involves people who are frequenting upstate New York hotels and resorts. And this is a time when upstate New York was the resort capital. 100 years ago, travel was still a real undertaking.PETER: Yeah.

BEN DAVISON: You couldn’t just get on a plane and go to Hawaii. So the wealthy would just go to really this kind of bucolic place in upstate New York, and places that were earmarked as sort of really being a place where you can get healthy, get out of the city air, really commune with nature. And it was a really popular place to go.

BRIAN: OK. Well, let’s drill down into the this question a little more and try to throw out some possibilities. So salads or fish? BEN DAVISON: My guess would be salads.

BRIAN: Why? BEN DAVISON: For a long time, really thought the 19th century, Americans ate terribly. It was impossible, really, in major cities to get vegetables. By the time they got to the market in New York, they’d be wilted, crushed. For a lot of wealthy Americans, being able to afford salad greens that were still intact– that was a big deal.

So if you were entertaining people on a private yacht, like Boldt was, when supposedly his chef came up with this recipe, the first thing you do– because these would all be local elites, your friends, wealthy people.You’d serve a salad. It’s summer. And this was really sort of the height of sophistication.

BRIAN: OK. So I’m going with salad over fish. I buy that. Why dressings in the first place?

BEN DAVISON: You know, we’re kind of spoiled now that we can go to the store and get these like kind of sweet, supple mesclun and spring mix, arugula. You couldn’t do that 100 years ago.

BRIAN: Yeah. Pre-washed. BEN DAVISON: Right. The greens you’re buying– they’re bitter. They are just like, what can really be grown? Like, New York doesn’t really take to spring mix. It takes to endives and chicories, real tough watercress.

BRIAN: So you have this delicacy that’s so untasty that you need to come up with a dressing? BEN DAVISON: Kind of, yeah. And there’s really no way around it.

BRIAN: Oh boy, this is the lives of rich and famous.

BEN DAVISON: But remember, it’s all about style and sophistication. It’s really about showing off that you can afford this thing that isn’t really that good to begin with.

BRIAN: OK. So you’re cruising on Boldt’s yacht through the Thousand islands on the Canadian border. And the chef– how does he present this Thousand Island dressing?

BEN DAVISON: My honest guess is– and this is just someone who used to cook for a living. He probably got a pile of greens from some farmer nearby, and he had this stuff. And he’s like, all right. Taste it. Oh, god.This is horribly bitter.

BRIAN: [LAUGH]

BEN DAVISON: I guarantee this is how it went down. And, you know, mayonnaise is a great masking agent for bitterness. The fat, the salt, the acid really helps tame those kind of wild bitter kind of dense greens.

BRIAN: Yeah.

BEN DAVISON: But mayonnaise, by itself, at that point, was already becoming passe as a salad dressing.

BRIAN: So plain mayonnaise wasn’t cutting it anymore.

BEN DAVISON: Right. So you needed to kind of gussy that up. And that’s where the ketchup comes in, or this tomato condiment. And the funny thing about ketchup is that 100 years ago, you said ketchup, people would ask you what kind. Because ketchup for a long time really referred to a style sauces that was more like a chutney.

BRIAN: I see.

BEN DAVISON: The most popular ketchup in America, in, say, 1900 would have been mushroom ketchup or walnut ketchup.

BRIAN: Wow. BEN DAVISON: If you think about other really common salad dressings at the time– they’ll mix mayonnaise with walnut ketchup and they’ll dress that on some ungodly combinations. A really popular salad mixed cottage cheese, chives, and bananas. He probably just thought, all right. Well, this is how I have always sort of treated these things. The tomatoes is sweet, the mayonnaise– it brings out a lot of good flavors. I mean, we still like Thousand Island dressing, because it’s good.

BRIAN: Well, speaking of that — and I don’t want to be too classist, here.But it seems like Thousand Island dressings has come down a couple of notches in terms of class status. How did that go down?

BEN DAVISON: My guess is at the time, 100 years ago, when this was really coming out, this was something that really was on elite tables.

BRIAN: Yes.

BEN DAVISON: It slowly diffused, like a lot of things. It has a lot to do with the ways that– especially after the Second World War, Americansstarted eating the way the wealthy ate, but in a very particular way. They started really going after ingredients cooking styles that were associatedwith comfort and affluence. Some nutritionists have argued that one of the reasons why the working class of 100 years ago had such a short lifespan was their diet was effectively some combination of lard and cornmeal. BRIAN: Yeah. Do you think that when Thousand Island dressing became a bit declasse, or, a nicer word is diffused, as you put it,do you think part of that was that it sounded so exotic, that people thought they were actually eating something quite special? BEN DAVISON: Absolutely. The Thousand Islands for a lot of Americans,resonated with this idea of relaxation, comfort. You’re travelling somewhere in a place that had, for the better part of the latter half the 19th century, been a designated special resort location. BRIAN: Right.Right.

BEN DAVISON: And then as all these ingredients become more available and certain tastes become sort of stratified and ossified. [INAUDIBLE], oh, it’s just Thousand Island dressing.

BRIAN: Well, Ben, thanks for a-dressing this incredibly important issue here on BackStory today.

BEN DAVISON: My pleasure. [MUSIC HARRY BELAFONTE, “ISLAND IN THE SUN”]

BRIAN: Ben Davison is a historian at the University of Virginia. He’s currently working on a history of supermarkets in America.

PETER: And that is going to do it for us today. But if you’ve still got island fever, drop in at our website, where we’ve got a whole lot more about island history. And while you’re there, take a minute to weigh in on our upcoming show about speed. What counted as fast when you were a kid,and how has that changed in your lifetime?