Ranch dressing: God's gift to the Midwest

I am SO over vinaigrettes. All the uppity restaurants are trying to outdo each other with the most bizarre and complicated vinaigrette dressings so they can win the coveted Culinary Arrogance prize. 

Waiter: “The house salad comes with a raspberry oregano chive honey lime cilantro citrus sherry beet white pepper garlic vinaigrette.” 

And then I pull out the trump card.

“Can I have ranch instead?”

I feel ashamed and white trashy. But you know what? I refuse to feel that way any more! Ranch dressing is amazing!

If the Midwest had an official food, it would be ranch dressing. I know people who eat it on everything from pizza to potato chips. It is a buttermilk, herby ambrosia given to us by a God who clearly wants to give us a little bit of happiness while we eat leaves. (Side note - ranch seasoning also makes amazing dips. Put it in sour cream or plain yogurt, and voila - all vegetables taste better!) 

I’m mostly not talking about the pre-bottled, preservative-laden stuff at the grocery store. I’m talking about the dressing that’s made in the best restaurants. I don’t mean top-of-Zagat’s best: I mean “best” because they know enough to realize making ranch dressing in-house is a solid investment. I go to some restaurants just for their ranch dressing, and I can tell you just about every restaurant in the Kansas City metropolitan area that makes its own in house. (There’s one pizza place that will put it in an empty condiment bottle and sell it to you if you ask them to, which I do.) I’m also talking about stuff you make at home, even with the help of a seasoning packet. That still is far and away better than Hidden Valley Ranch. It ain’t good if it doesn’t require refrigeration before opening. (But props to the original Hidden Valley, which did pretty much invent ranch dressing, according to Wikipedia. Where would we be without them?)

I pity my friends in other parts of the world who don’t have ready access to such ranchy wonderfulness. On a trip to England a few years back, I ordered a salad at a pub. Imagine my surprise when it came out completely dry. I requested some dressing. I was treated to a blob of mayonnaise on a plate. Um, no. My poor friend who married a British man and now lives there is deprived of ranch, so I send her the seasoning packets by mail on occasion. Ranch dressing was reason enough to fight the Revolutionary War. And to worship or not worship as we chose, but also the freedom to dress salads with something better than mayonnaise.

I also have a legitimate health reason to choose ranch dressing over those stupid vinaigrettes. I have a super acidy stomach. I’ve had an endoscopy to check it out (doctor’s quote on the findings: “Your body just produces a whole lot of acid”) and take prescription medicine to keep it at bay. I have to be careful about what I eat and drink, avoiding things like tomatoes (especially cooked ones), citrus, alcohol, carbonated beverages and the mother of all stomach lining destroyers: vinegar. A vinaigrette makes my insides go ablaze, and I have to spend the rest of the day chugging Pepto and eating Tums to stay out of total misery. But you know what doesn’t hurt my tummy? Creamy, fatty ranch goodness. 

I get so fed up with hoity-toity restaurants having a whole menu without gluten for people who think they have gluten intolerance (it’s not a thing!) but only vinaigrette salad dressings available. I have a legitimate, diagnosed medical reaction to vinegar, and so do a lot of other people! Why are there eight different pastas made out of rice flour but not a single salad dressing with a pH level over 3?! (You know what pH level buttermilk is? Seven. Perfectly neutral, and perfect in my tummy and on my tongue.) It makes me so angry that I’m using exclamation points to end multiple sentences, which I normally hate!

Breathe. Breathe. When I ask for ranch dressing in a hoity-toity place, I sometimes feel like the waiter thinks I’ve asked for a jar of Cheez Wiz. I bet he goes back and tells his fellow servers, “That girl out there ordered ranch dressing. I bet she’s going to go home to her trailer after this, put on a tube top and watch Dog the Bounty Hunter.” You know what, let ‘em think that. They’re all trying to convince themselves they like vinaigrettes better, but deep down, like me, they’d rather eat homemade ranch dressing with a spoon. 

Nerd girl fantasies, tempered with scarlet fever realities

Part of my nerd-girl fantasies involve just waking up one day in the Regency era of England. I would stroll the gardens of my manor house and a handsome man in breeches would come up, and we’d have a witty conversation. Then that night we’d dance together at a ball and kiss under candle-lit chandeliers. The next day I would ride some horses, be nice to servants who served me a lavish meal, wear a lovely empire-waisted dress and lament the way some members of the gentry treated lower classes. The day after that, I would marry the handsome guy in breeches (who would be rich) in a lovely village church. Everyone would cheer as we exited and got into our marriage carriage. 

But the realistic part of me thinks that if the real me really were in the Regency era, it would have been less Jane Austeny and more rampant diseasy. I recently finished reading the book “Longbourne” by Jo Baker, which is sort of a retelling of “Pride and Prejudice” from the servants’ point of view (along with an aside about the Napoleonic wars which was super violent and not at all what one is prepared for in reading a Jane Austen take-off). It made the world of Ms. Austen’s novels much more real. Like how the main character servant had to wash all the menstrual napkins of all five Bennet daughters, all of whom had their period at the exact same time. (And yes, men, women who spend a lot of time together really do all menstruate at the same time. [See: my roommate/BFF and me when we lived together in college.] So like if we still lived in caves, a fertile caveman could come in and impregnate everyone all at once, which is very efficient evolutionarily but can make for a house full of PMSing drama queens nowadays.)

Just the thought of a life without tampons (or adhesive pads, for that matter) can make a modern woman shudder. But let’s start with my life from the beginning, set back about 200 years. First thing, I would be motherless. My mom almost bled to death in childbirth and had to get a ton of transfusions and stuff. Hence why I am an only child. And maybe my dad would have remarried, and I would have had an evil or lovely stepmother because he’d have to make a male heir so we could keep our house for the next generation. Or did that apply to non-rich people? Did Regency middle-classish people have to worry about entails and heirs? 

Next, I probably would have flat-out died when I was 7 or 8 years old. I had repeated bouts of scarlet fever at that age. This was the same disease that made them burn everything in “The Velveteen Rabbit,” which was written about 100 years after the Regency time period. So it was killing kids pretty good for a while. But thanks to antibiotics and tonsil removal, I survived. In the early 1800s, however, they probably would have just put some leeches on me and called it a day when I croaked. 

If I had survived all that scarlet fever 200 years ago, then I would have been way ugly. I had four years of braces as an adolescent. Four. Years. Because, and I quote my orthodontist, “all those teeth have a hard time fitting in such a small mouth.” So I would have been just another snaggletoothed, cavity-ridden Brit. Also, I had super bad acne. In Jane Austen times, there would be no dermatologist to fix it, and no make-up to cover up the spots during flare-ups. And no mascara. I need mascara. I have really blonde eyelashes and look very, very tired without it. 

This leads me to a whole host of other hygiene things that would be missing: effective soap, toothpaste indoor plumbing (that’s a big one) and refrigeration. And the comforts - central heating and cooling, cars and planes, the internet - doesn’t that sound like an awful world?!

I really like the idea of the dresses, but you’d have to wear a corset underneath. After watching a lot of period pieces, part of me is intrigued about what kind of cleavage it could give me. If it can give Keira Knightley some round, uplifted ta-tas, maybe it could do something for me, too. But the squishing factor - yikes. And not just of the boobs, but of the ribs and stomach and all those organs in there. 

Finally, I think Regency-era me would be really bored. I like having a career. It seems like English women portrayed in books in the early 1800s just did needlepoint all day. And then to entertain each other at night, they played piano and sang. Yawn. Although I wouldn’t mind being able to take a nap every day, I’d probably go stir crazy. But because I probably would be ugly without the help of modern medicine or orthodontia, I likely wouldn’t get married. So I’d be a spinster, and I don’t know if that would leave me more or less free to do things outside of embroidery.  

So I conclude that the real Regency era was really only good for attractive, rich people who didn’t menstruate. Which I guess isn’t that different from modern times, after all.