I first remember seeing Green Goddess dressing – the one in the Annie’s bottle, with the goddess with the flowing hair and Zen energy on the label – at health food stores in my college town, Gainesville, Florida. They represented a new hippie way of eating to me, one that introduced me to words like quinoa and seitan, and one where fresh earthy flavors were foregrounded. I assumed that the name was associated with the herbs infused in the dressing, and maybe I sort of thought there was some implication that you’d feel like a goddess if you ate green things. I started thinking about the dressing recently when it was the answer to a question on Jeopardy. Mayim Bialik posed the riddle, “Traditionally this alliterative salad dressing is big on mayonnaise, but a viral TikTok used olive oil & nuts.”

As it turns out, the name doesn’t reference the color of the dressing or the plants it’s derived from. It was created at the Palace Hotel in downtown San Francisco in reference to a popular play in the 1920’s. The hotel is famous for the many actors who have graced its tables, and the place where sitting President Harding passed away. It also claims to be the place where Turkey Tetrazzini was invented, named for the Opera singer Luisa Tetrazzini, one of their many famous guests. While the dressing was born on the West Coast, it started to go national in 1948 when the New York Times published the recipe. Mamie Eisenhower published her version in a women’s magazine in the 1950’s, citing that it was Ike’s favorite; many people erroneously credit her with its invention for this reason. By the 1960’s it was being bottled, and by the 1980’s it often joined ranch and French as an option at salad bars. Today it’s popular in the Southeast as a dipping sauce for fried oysters or other shellfish.