Seventeenth Issue: Salad Dressing, Reindeer, and a Deadly Head
This week’s newsletter is going to be a little bit different than previous ones. I’ve got a grab bag of three shorter historical stories, facts, and anecdotes, without any particular theme tying them together. They’re all interesting, but none are long enough for me to dedicate an entire issue to them.
Salad dressing
This one was a request from a reader (who you can find on twitter @giltcomplex)! Unfortunately I didn’t find out TOO much about salad dressing but I must confess part of that is because I personally am not really into salad or dressing. Atomic Age food was bizarre and ridiculous though, and they were super into dressing. Here's an interesting article with some pictures about the weird food trends of the time in the United States.
Thousand Island Dressing: The name for this dressing comes from the Thousand Islands region located between the United States and Canada. There are various stories about how it came to be, one being that fisherman’s wife made the condiment for her husband and an actress, May Irwin, requested the recipe, passing it on to George Boldt who owned the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. George then passed the recipe on to the hotel’s chef and had him start making it. Others, however, say that the recipe was based on French dressing, and yet another story is that the dressing was invented in Chicago by a chef named Theo Rooms. There’s no way to really figure out what the truth is, but many sociologists have tried (why, I have no idea. Surely there are more important things to study).
Ranch Dressing: This was invented in the 1950s by a man named Steve Henson, who opened Hidden Valley Ranch in California after making money working as a plumber in Alaska. He served the dressing with his wife to guests (not serving his wife, that would be cannibalism, but serving ranch), and it became a factory eventually bought by Clorox in 1972.
Italian Dressing: This dressing was invented in the Wishbone Restaurant in Kansas City Missouri in 1948. The restaurant was run by Phillip Sollomi and his mom, Lena. The recipe was based on Lena’s Sicilian family roots and became popular very fast. This dressing was bought by Lipton and has been bought by other companies since. In Italy, they don’t use this kind of dressing, putting olive oil, vinegar, and salt on salads instead.
Caesar Dressing: The salad and dressing are attributed to Caesar Cardini, an Italian restaurant owner who lived in the United States and Mexico (to avoid Prohibition rules) and ran restaurants in both countries. His daughter says he invented the salad on a Fourth of July when the rush of customers depleted the kitchen supplies, so he put together what he could with what he had. Here's a picture of Mr. Cardini:
This one was a request from a reader (who you can find on twitter @giltcomplex)! Unfortunately I didn’t find out TOO much about salad dressing but I must confess part of that is because I personally am not really into salad or dressing. Atomic Age food was bizarre and ridiculous though, and they were super into dressing. Here's an interesting article with some pictures about the weird food trends of the time in the United States.
Thousand Island Dressing: The name for this dressing comes from the Thousand Islands region located between the United States and Canada. There are various stories about how it came to be, one being that fisherman’s wife made the condiment for her husband and an actress, May Irwin, requested the recipe, passing it on to George Boldt who owned the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. George then passed the recipe on to the hotel’s chef and had him start making it. Others, however, say that the recipe was based on French dressing, and yet another story is that the dressing was invented in Chicago by a chef named Theo Rooms. There’s no way to really figure out what the truth is, but many sociologists have tried (why, I have no idea. Surely there are more important things to study).
Ranch Dressing: This was invented in the 1950s by a man named Steve Henson, who opened Hidden Valley Ranch in California after making money working as a plumber in Alaska. He served the dressing with his wife to guests (not serving his wife, that would be cannibalism, but serving ranch), and it became a factory eventually bought by Clorox in 1972.
Italian Dressing: This dressing was invented in the Wishbone Restaurant in Kansas City Missouri in 1948. The restaurant was run by Phillip Sollomi and his mom, Lena. The recipe was based on Lena’s Sicilian family roots and became popular very fast. This dressing was bought by Lipton and has been bought by other companies since. In Italy, they don’t use this kind of dressing, putting olive oil, vinegar, and salt on salads instead.
Caesar Dressing: The salad and dressing are attributed to Caesar Cardini, an Italian restaurant owner who lived in the United States and Mexico (to avoid Prohibition rules) and ran restaurants in both countries. His daughter says he invented the salad on a Fourth of July when the rush of customers depleted the kitchen supplies, so he put together what he could with what he had. Here's a picture of Mr. Cardini:
Earl Sigurd the Mighty
Sigurd was a Norwegian guy who ended up becoming the Earl of Orkney, which is an island in Scotland. This was a long time ago, in like 1000 AD. Anyway, he was a good earl apparently, but the story of his life is not told nearly as often as the story of his death. Sigurd made an alliance with a guy called Thorstein the Red and they conquered a bunch of land but when he got over to Moray he had a problem. Sigurd was in a fight with a local man called Maelbrigte Tusk (named such because of his big protruding teeth). They decided to meet in battle with forty men each, but Sigurd didn’t trust Maelbrigte so he brought 40 horses, but had two men on each one.
Maelbrigte noticed and was pissed, but he told his men to just fight and kill two men each and everything would be fine. Everything was not fine, and Maelbrigte died. Sigurd was so happy that he won. He had the heads of his enemies cut off and strapped to the saddles of the horses as a show of his victory. He kept Maelbrigte’s head for his own. Here's a picture of him all excited because he killed him:
The story isn’t over yet. Maelbrigte’s protruding teeth scratched Sigurd’s leg as he rode home. The scratch became infected and Sigurd died from it. Karma.
The Submarine Reindeer
In 1941, a British Submarine called the HMS Trident was fighting German forces up in the Arctic Circle when they were given a gift of a reindeer by a Soviet admiral. Her name was Pollyanna. Submarines are already cramped, and this one had 56 crew members, but Pollyanna was kept healthy and safe. She was there for six weeks. She ate a barrel of moss that the Russians gave with her, but when that ran out she ate kitchen scraps. Her favorite was Carnation brand condensed milk. Here's a (low quality, sorry! I couldn't find any other) picture of Pollyanna being presented as a gift:
She was initially inserted into the submarine through a tube, but she didn’t want to stay there, and slept under the captain’s bed. When the submarine surfaced for air, she would run through to the main hatch so she could get some fresh air before returning to the officers’ mess for some food. Pollyanna ate one of the navigation charts, but despite this the HMS Trident went back to Northumberland. Now there was a new problem – Pollyanna was too fat now to get back out through the tube she’d come in.
A winch and a crewman with a broom together somehow got Pollyanna out of the submarine, where she moved to the London Zoo and lived happily there. It was wartime though, and whenever she heard a siren she ducked down like she was still on the submarine. Her old ship was decommissioned in 1947, five years later, and she died within a week of that event, in a strange coincidence.
To end this week's issue, here is a cool old picture I found of some cats. See you next week!
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