It is easy to believe that 1000 Islands dressing was named for its looks. At least as much as a chicken’s leg could be a drumstick or a pastry-wrapped frankfurter evoke a pig in a blanket, the creamy, pickle-dotted stuff puts one in mind of myriad atolls in a smooth pink sea.
The dressing was named not for its appearance, but its birthplace, a stretch of the St. Lawrence River known as the Thousand Islands. Among the few competing stories that explain its origin, the most logical is that it was christened by actress and cookbook writer May Irwin, who went upstate to fish for black bass and northern pike a century ago. The outing featured a twilight meal hosted by wilderness guide George LaLonde, at which he served a salad made with a dressing concocted by his wife, Sofia. Miss Irwin brought the recipe back to New York and presented it to George Boldt, owner of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, as “1000 Islands dressing.” Boldt was so impressed that he put it on the menu just as Miss Irwin had enjoyed it—atop a tossed salad with a garnish of chopped hard-boiled egg. With maitre d’ Oscar Tschirsky as its booster, Sofia LaLonde’s picnic-style salad dressing became a Park Avenue counterpart of Creole remoulade and an emblem of fine hotel-room dining.
The hotel at which May Irwin stayed in Clayton, New York, then known as the Herald Hotel, is now the 1000 Islands Inn. Naturally the inn serves 1000 Islands dressing on its salads in the dining room, and it is still a base camp for charter boats and angling expeditions during which guests fish the St. Lawrence River, then enjoy their catch, pan-fried over an open fire, with eggs, bacon, and potatoes. The inn annually puts up five thousand bottles of original-recipe dressing. They bear labels boasting that it is “the only salad dressing ever named for a region of the United States.”