The Food and Drug Administration recently announced it would no longer regulate the standards for French salad dressing. Those standards required certain ingredients. As it turns out, French dressing was a name given to variations of a vinaigrette dressing. Over the years, several flavorings, such as ketchup, tabasco sauce and Worcestershire sauce were added, and it became a creamy dressing. All those changes apparently happened in the United States, not France, so French dressing is essentially an American dressing. So are several other popular salad dressings. I have a list of four salad dressings and four places where they are said to have been developed. See if you can match them correctly. The dressings are Italian, ranch, Thousand Island and Russian. The locations are Alaska, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New York.
Answer:
The exact history of French dressing we know is American and exactly where it changed from a simple vinaigrette is unclear. French dressing is the oldest one on our list, but vinegar and oil dressing goes back nearly two-thousand years to ancient Babylonia. The Italian dressing we know is said to have been developed by the wife of a restaurant owner in Framingham, Massachusetts in 1941. That was Ken's Steakhouse, and Ken's salad dressing began there. Seven years later in 1948, the Wishbone Restaurant in Kansas City introduced its version of Italian dressing and began selling Wishbone dressing.
Ranch dressing was the creation in 1949 of Nebraska native Steve Henson, who fed it to the crew of his plumbing company in Anchorage, Alaska. When Henson retired, he bought a ranch in Santa Barbara County, California and decided to run a restaurant, changing the name of his Sweetwater Ranch to Hidden Valley Ranch. After the dressing became popular at the restaurant, Henson sold it to customers and later marketed it to grocery stores. Ranch has been the best-selling salad dressing in the United States since 1992, when it passed Italian
There are several versions of how Thousand Island dressing was created, but all the versions say it took place in upstate New York in the Thousand Islands region along the upper St. Lawrence River. And Russian dressing, basically a variation of French dressing, is said to have been developed in the 1910's in Nashua, New Hampshire. It was called Russian because the original recipe included caviar.
A couple of other salad dressings have interesting beginnings. Caesar salad and Caesar dressing are not named for Julius Caesar, but Caesar Cardini, an Italian restaurant worker who settled in California. Cardini wanted to open his own restaurant. but Prohibition had just begun and by eliminating alcoholic drinks, it was taking a toll on the restaurant business. Cardini decided to move to Mexico, where he could serve alcohol, and that's where the Caesar salad and its dressing debuted.
Green Goddess dressing also traces its history to California. Most sources say it was created in San Francisco in 1923 to honor actor George Arliss and his hit play, "The Green Goddess". The chef at the city's Palace Hotel created a dressing of anchovies, scallions, parsley, tarragon, mayonnaise, tarragon vinegar, and chives. It's actually a variation of a dressing originated in France by a chef to Louis XIII who made a green sauce that was traditionally served with eel.
