I’ll see if I can dig up the Steve Henson lore tomorrow morning. He really was quite the character. Here are some excerpts from Coleman Andrews, then at the LA Times: “Earlier this year, I wrote about the origins of that ubiquitous contemporary condiment known as “ranch dressing,” noting that it had been invented at the Hidden Valley Guest Ranch in Santa Barbara after World War II.
Shortly after my column on the subject appeared, I received a long letter from Alan Barker of Los Angeles, who lived and worked at the ranch from 1959 to 1963, adding quite a bit of colorful detail to the story. I’ve been meaning to run excerpts from his letter since that time. I hereby do so:
““The dressing was invented in the mid-’50s,” Barker writes, “not right after the war. It was concocted by Steve Henson, who opened Hidden Valley as a sort of country club, nightclub, dude ranch in the mountains. He and his wife Gayle built it from a much smaller existing ranch with money they had made in Alaska in the plumbing business. The ranch was not received well and promptly went broke. During my stay, we lived on peanut butter sandwiches and leftovers from parties thrown there by UCSB fraternities and sororities.
“Steve was a muscular, hard-drinking, tale-telling cowboy sort. He charmed most who came to the ranch. There were 20 different stories of how he captured the bear whose skin hung in the foyer. If I recall correctly, he found the bearskin in the local dump where he got most of the ‘Old West’ decor that littered the ranch. Gayle cleaned, cooked as many as 300 steak dinners a night when the ranch was leased out for a party, and played the organ to entertain guests at night. They were the two hardest-working, most unwilling-to-give-up people I have known. Gayle once said that she married Steve ‘because I couldn’t get rid of him . . . and he beat up all my other boyfriends.’ There was a daughter, Connie, and a son, Nolan--who was my best friend during those years.
“The dressing, which was originally mixed with buttermilk and mayonnaise, had no name at first. We ate it on everything from steaks to, in a comical moment, ice cream. The guests at the ranch first began asking for jars of it to take home for themselves, and then wanted larger quantities for their friends. They took it in liquid form in mayonnaise jars. The impracticality of this led to packaging the mix as a powder.”
