The Perils of Searching for Salad Dressings

And how Walt Disney let us down.

In place of the classic blue-cheese wedge, we give you the layer cake.

SALAD DRESSING CAN BE LIKE A MARRIAGE. You commit to a favorite in, say, your late twenties or early thirties. You proceed to drizzle it over every single salad you make. You wake up one day and realize you’re just going through the motions: Who cares, how much longer could I possibly live, whatever, this dressing is fine.

But it’s not fine.

The more dressings you have in your repertoire, the more salad you’ll eat, and the happier you’ll be. Trust me. I am not saying that you should quit your job, cash in your IRA, and open a dressing factory. I am saying that every person should have three or four or even five dressings that feel like absolute magic to them.

Easy! Whiz up some flavorful things, throw in blue cheese.

Everyone is different of course. You could spend a lifetime trying to find dressings that are right for you. Luckily, you have me—a person who has dedicated her remaining years on this planet to salad with a secondary goal of gathering a list of good dressings as long and lovely as a country lane—to do it for you.

I am aware that my quest has made my life lopsided. It devours many hours in my day when normal people are socializing with loved ones or watching the sun set or playing jai alai. But I can’t help myself. It’s my nature. My plan is to supplement this newsletter with even more randomly acquired dressings from various sources.

People playing jai alai rather than searching for salad dressings.

But while it happens to be my idea of fun, the search for dressing magic has led me to dark places that I wish I could forget. Recently, I put my faith in the Magic Kingdom. Walt Disney not only let me down, he also wrecked my kitchen and temporarily defeated my spirit.

The Reader’s Digest Version: I found an intriguing recipe card last week with Disney World’s Top of the World Dressing scribbled on it. I took a photo of it, got home, and realized I’d forgotten to snap the flip-side instructions. I tried hunting the recipe down online but ended up buying an expensive Mickey Mouse cookbook (I really did), which happens to have some pretty great and inventive-looking salads and dressings. I’ll share some of them in the future.

A young Walt Disney, about to enjoy a salad. (I’m not sure where I got this photo; otherwise I’d credit it.)

The Top of the World dressing, however, was a disaster—despite the fact that it requires 6 anchovies. I think it was supposed to come together like a highly flavored, slightly thin mayonnaise, but it never did for me. I ended up with a big sloshing bowl of oily, oniony, fish scented liquid, which I promptly spilled all over my kitchen floor. I’m still finding yellow blotches on my clothing, tea towels, and cabinets. I deeply regret wishing upon a star.

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To make myself feel better, I made another intriguing recipe I brought home from those recipe boxes, for blue cheese dressing. It prompted my interest because I found so many versions of it, two of which had the tiny word “delicious” in the upper right-hand corner—including this one, which is so old it looks like it’s written on papyrus.

It turned out to be everything the Disney recipe was not: an old-school miracle. Unlike the overly creamy, overly chunky blue cheese dressings you may get in restaurants, which are often delicious but guilty of both overkill and unctuousness, this dressing was proud of its thinner consistency and happy to sport flavors complementing the blue cheese rather than bowing down to it: assertive onion, a bit of paprika, mustard, and, most notably, just enough aromatic celery seed (which I’d always thought I did not like and it turns out I love).

I could have eaten it without even adding the blue cheese at the end. But I probably never will.

*RECIPE: Old-School Recipe-Box Blue Cheese Dressing

Makes about 2 ½ cups

Blue cheese is served with iceberg so often that people forget that both the lettuce and the dressing are good for other things. I happen to love the iconic wedge salad, but it’s never been ideal in terms of dressing distribution. And the glory of iceberg is that it’s light, super-crisp, and submissive. It wants to be drenched in dressing. So I decided to slice my head of iceberg crosswise into thick, flat platters that would allow a big spoonful of dressing to seep into the lettuce crevices more completely. After I plated up one slice as a single serving, I decided to instead stack them, which would be a great way to serve this quick and delicious dressing for a little dinner party. Bring it to the table, slice the stack into quarters, serve. It would also be delicious with very thin slices of white onion between each disk of dressed lettuce.

The original version of this recipe, from my Aunt Mariah’s recipe box, included two tablespoons of sugar, which I omitted, and more than twice (⅓ of a cup) the vegetable oil. Do with this information what you will.

• 1 small onion, cut up

• 1 cup mayonnaise (I use Duke’s)

• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil (I used canola)

• ¼ cup ketchup

• 2 tablespoons vinegar (I used cider; red or white wine vinegar would be fine)

• 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

• ½ teaspoon salt

• ½ teaspoon paprika

• ¼ teaspoon celery seed

• A few grindings black pepper

• 1 cup (4 ounces) crumbled blue cheese

Place all ingredients except blue cheese in a blender and process until smooth. Stir in blue cheese. Transfer to an airtight container and chill completely before serving.

Old School Recipe Box Blue Cheese Dressing

1.14MB ∙ PDF file

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