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Recipe: Russian Dressing 29 September 2009 10:51 am

Posted by Tracy in : books,cooking,recipes,salad,seasonality , trackback

It’s fall, gentle readers. I am reluctant to admit it after such a weird summer, much of it cold and wet. But the sun barely shone into my food sociology class at 5 PM yesterday, and not just because it was overcast. The days are now shorter than the nights in this hemisphere, and that’s that. Still, I’ve been craving salad, perhaps because I haven’t eaten it much the past season what with the weird weather and salad-meister Peter being across the country. So last week I made this dressing, since although salad is one of my summer foods I wanted something a little richer and autumnal than my standard vinaigrette. I worked from a recipe in my beloved Moosewood New Classics, kinda like Tracy Granola is based on New Classics, only perhaps even more so — for both recipes, I open the cookbook to the original recipe’s page, then change almost every ingredient’s measurement to my personal tastes. All of which is to say, please, tweak my version to your heart’s content. For more food for thought about how cookbooks are written and how that may not have much relation to how they’re used, check out Rachel Laudan’s recent-ish post about Julia Child, Elizabeth David, and other visions of French food. I liked it very much. And now, on with the recipe.

Easy Russian Dressing

You may know Russian dressing as the sauce on Reuben sandwiches — in fact, the Moosewood recipe I’m working from is intended for their Portobello Reuben, but I’ve actually never tried it on either the mushroom or the tempeh version of the famous pile of tastiness and sauerkraut. It’s like a spiced-up Thousand Island: creamy, a little sweet and tart, but with a nice peppery zing of horseradish. If you can’t find that (and I never could, in Eugene), don’t worry, there’s ways to work around it.

Special note to my vegan and egg-free friends: the only animal ingredient used here is mayonnaise, for which I am certain you know clever substitutions. Please write me if you have an alternative to the commercially made non-egg mayos, because I would love to find one that is actually tasty (or at least not so darn sweet).

Ingredients

All amounts are approximate and adjustable to your personal tastes; this is my best guess as to how I like my version of this dressing to turn out.

Directions

Combine all ingredients in a blender and run that baby till the mixture is more or less smooth. Adjust the flavor to whatever you like by tweaking tomato paste for sweetness (or cheating with a little sugar), tomato and vinegar for sour, hot pepper sauce, black pepper, mustard, and horseradish for heat, and salt for — well, you know.

Serve on a nice hearty salad, maybe one with cottage cheese and sunflower seeds for extra bonus protein with your veggies. Or make a Reuben with the ingredients of your choice (try roasted vegetables, like at this great Upper West Side deli — so awesome!) Or use the dressing as dip for veggies as pictured in this post, and described in Saying Goodbye to Eugene.

  • http://www.vegandance.blogspot.com Jenn Lynskey

    I do like hot sauce in my reuben dressing, and horseradish sounds good too. I really dig Vegenaise. I like the blue label best, but they all taste similar. I don’t think I’d describe it as sweet.