Wishbone salad dressings have been kitchen staples for a half-century. Not just because the 37 flavors (including the fat-free and low-fat Just 2 Good versions) are pretty tasty on a cold iceberg salad but because many of them can be used as inexpensive meat marinades too. The story of the dressing is local lore: In 1948, a newly discharged army vet named Phil Sollomi opened a fried chicken restaurant in an old Kansas City mansion at 45th and Main and named it The Wishbone. Salads were "dressed up" with the piquant herb-oil-and-vinegar dressing created by his Sicilian-born mother, Lena. When demand for the dressing increased, Sollomi turned the old carriage house behind the restaurant into an improvised factory, mixing up vats of Italian dressing in big wooden barrels. By 1956, Wishbone Salad Dressing was the top-selling Italian dressing in the country; Lipton purchased the rights to manufacture it the following year. Though the namesake restaurant was gone by the 1970s, the dressings never left town. Today, 100 gallons of Wishbone Dressing are bottled every minute at a big plant in Independence, and the ingredients for each batch are still hand-measured and -mixed in small quantities. The factory ships out 24 million cases each year of such varieties as Chunky Blue Cheese, Creamy Italian, and Berry Vinaigrette. But the original Italian dressing, Lena Sollomi's recipe, remains the most popular.
