Welcome to brain Stuff from house stuff works dot com where smart happens. Hi, I'm Marshall Brain with Today's Christian Where do salad dressings get their bizarre names? Although manufacturers introduce new flavors all the time, many consumers stick to their longtime favorites and salad dressings. These include Ranch, French, Italian, Caesar, blue Cheese, and Thousand Island and many dressings available in stores and restaurants are just variations on these traditional favorites.
Most of the dressings you use either are creamy and have mayonnaise as the base ingredient, or their oily and they have salad oil as the base ingredient. The herbs, spices, and other flavorings are added to make a certain kind of dressing. So here are some of the favorites. First, there's Thousand Island dressing. It was named for the thou was an island region and Upstate New York where the
dressing originated. The region, along the St. Lawrence Seaway and Lake Ontario, is a popular spot for fishermen and hunters and other tourists. The key ingredients in this dressing are mayonnaise and chili sauce, which is made from peppers and tomatoes. The tiny chunks in the dressing are finely chopped pickles, onions, olives, and hard cooked egg. Ranch dressing actually originated on a ranch, in this case the Hidden Valley Guest Ranch near Santa Barbara, California.
According to the Hidden Valley website, the owners made a dressing with herbs, spices, and butter milk in the nineteen fifties and the dressing caught on with their guests. The dressing was sold as a dry mix that you combined with butter milk and mayonnaise or sour cream. Now, the Hidden Valley brand appears on several varieties of bottled ranch dressing and supermarkets as well. It's also a very popular
dip for vegetables and chips. And then there's the ranch flavor that you find in potato chips now that is added to the chips in the form of a buttermilk taste that we associate with ranch dressing. French dressing is apparently an American invention. There are several different recipes for French dressing, but most of them use ketchup oil, vinegar, and paprika. A similar dressing is called Russian which often
has chili sauces, an ingredient. Italian dressing gets its name from the Italian seasonings found in it oregano, basil, and garlic, mixed with olive oil and wine vinegar. Blue cheese dressing is sometimes referred to as Rocafort dressing, but rocofort is a particular kind of blue cheese made of sheep's milk. It comes from the town of Rocafort in southwestern France. Regular blue cheese, a crumbly cheese that also has blue veins of mold in It is made from cow's milk.
The cheese is mixed with creamy ingredients like mayonnaise, sour cream, butter, milk, milk, or yogurt, and often with vinegar and some other spices. Caesar dressing comes from Caesar salad, a popular item on many restaurant menus. You'll hear two different stories about the origin of the name for Caesar salad. One story is
that it's named for Julius Caesar. Another story is that Caesar Cardini, an Italian immigrant to the United States, developed the salad dressing in the nineteen twenties for his restaurant in Tijuana, Mexico. Caesar Salad dressing is made of oil, lemon juice, raw egg, parmesan, cheese, herbs, and spices. Some recipes can chain an chovy filet's too. And then there's vinegarrette. It's a generic name for a salad dressing that uses oil and vinegar as its base, and then it adds
herbs and spices. There are many variations on the vinegrette theme, and it's popular because it can be lowering calories and fat than dressings that use mayonnaise. The name come was from the French word for vinegar. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com, and don't forget to check out the brain stuff blog on the how stuff works dot com home page. You can also follow brain stuff on Facebook or Twitter at brain stuff H. S W