Herbed Salad Dressing

My maternal grandmother cooked extraordinarily well. Like many immigrants who had lived as peasants in their native country, she relied on the land for her ingredients and recipes were passed down not through writing, but watching. Everything—and I mean everything—was homemade. Her pasta never came out of a box or even the refrigerated section of a grocery store. She didn’t purchase her bread from the baker on the corner—even though it was a damn good bakery. And our family’s tomato sauce was born from barrels of New Jersey plum tomatoes, picked fresh from the vine in late August. 

I remember tomato-jarring day when I was a little girl—tomato juice splattered across the counters, the floors, and the stove. My job was simple, but sacred—placing a single basil leaf in each of the mason jars filled with the warm marinara before they were sealed and stacked on basement shelves.

It’s no wonder, then, that the salad dressing incident from forty years ago remains so vivid in my mind. 

One night, my mother prepared a spinach salad while my grandmother was visiting. We usually ate our salad dressed with oil and vinegar, but for reasons known only to her, my mother liked Wish-Bone Italian dressing on spinach. She said there was something about the way it tasted with the bacon, hard-boiled egg, and red onion. 

Always eager to help in the kitchen, I took the bottle from the refrigerator and set it on the table. 

“Give that to me,” my mother said, her voice instantly frantic.

She quickly poured the dressing over the spinach salad.

“Now put it back,” she whispered, “so Grandma doesn’t see.”

“Why?”

“Put it back…NOW!”

I returned the bottle to the refrigerator, and dinner commenced as usual, until….my sister decided the salad needed more dressing and retrieved the bottle from the refrigerator. 

My grandmother’s eyes widened. She could not believe what she was seeing. 

“OHHHHHHHH,” she cried. “Why are you using that? OWWWW. No. No.”

She pushed her plate away and scolded my mother, never to return to the table that evening.

That night, I promised my grandmother I would never use bottled dressing. Further, I vowed to master the salad. And I did.  Salad is one of my favorite things to prepare and eat. 

I don’t think my grandmother would have liked this dressing. She never used sage and likely would have questioned using chives, insisting that thinly sliced onions directly in the salad provided better flavor. But it doesn’t come from a bottle—so all may have been forgiven.

Herbed Salad Dressing

1/3 cup white balsamic vinegar

2 teaspoons dijon mustard

1 tablespoon orange juice

1 tablespoon chopped fresh thyme

1 tablespoon chopped fresh sage

1 tablespoon chopped fresh rosemary

2 tablespoons chopped fresh chives

1/3 to 1/2 cup olive or avocado oil

Large pinch of kosher salt

Cracked black pepper 

Whisk well. Let sit for a couple hours before dressing salad.