The Dorothy State: The rollicking history of the neon-orange dressing that tastes like home

Of the tens of thousands of impoverished Scandinavians who fled crop failures and religious oppression for a fertile and free Nebraska in the late 19th century, probably only two are connected to something in Nebraskans’ kitchen today.

In 1913 in Cushing, Danish immigrants Edd and Meda Scott Peterson had one daughter, Dorothy. In 1952, she introduced her own sweet-and-spicy salad dressing at the St. Paul American Legion Club, which she ran with her husband, Arthur Lynch. It was such a success that customers would bring her jars from home to fill or surreptitiously slip the club’s bottles into their purses and pockets.

Once when the Lynches were away on vacation, back home their enterprising teenage son Neal started bottling the dressing for sale. With his parents’ eventual blessing, the business took off: By 1955, their basement operation was cranking out 120 bottles a day, which Neal delivered to grocery stores around central Nebraska.

They sold the recipe in 1964 to bolo-wearing recent law grad Mac Hull. Hull established his Tasty Toppings factory, first in Columbus then later in Duncan, where it continues today.

Over the decades, Dorothy Lynch Home Style became Nebraskans’ go-to dressing: in our home fridge doors clinking against the pickle jar, on crisp iceberg salads in tiny beige bowls at diners, next to the plastic forks in church basement potluck lines. The salad bar at The Drover, which its owners claim is the state’s first, includes Dorothy Lynch. Lincoln-based Mexican-American fast-food chain Amigo’s offers Dorothy on its toppings bars next to its volcanic quasi-cheese liquid and Diablo Salsa.

One factor uniting Nebraska’s small-town steakhouses – from Ole’s in Paxton to The Plainsman in Juniata to The Speakeasy in Sacramento – is Mrs. Lynch’s gastronomic bequest to the state. It’s served in Memorial Stadium and at Pinnacle Bank Arena. Kentucky has Colonel Sanders; Nebraska has Grandma Lynch.

If you’ve never tried the dressing — assuming you’re not licking your screen thanks to the FFP’s still-beta taste app — you’re wondering what’s in it.

Tasty Toppings CEO Marilea Hull refused to budge on sharing the recipe. “The secret is in the spices,” she said. But Monty Lynch showed me his grandmother Dorothy’s handwritten original: It includes tomato soup, celery seed, cane sugar, oil, vinegar, garlic powder, “mustard flour,” salt and pepper. A number of salad dressings are tomato-based: French, Russian, Thousand Island, Western, Catalina. But Dorothy Lynch is the only one that uses tomato soup.

A deep dive into Reddit, Facebook and Instagram reveals the dressing’s mission creep into condiment galaxies distant from planet salad: People eat it on pizza, tacos, nachos, burgers, steak, scrambled eggs, pork chops, baked potatoes, spaghetti, lasagna, meatloaf, bologna, ham, cottage cheese, crappies, salmon patties and sliced apples. 

They dip their fries, nuggets, wings, pretzels, dinner rolls and grilled cheese sandwiches into it. They mix it into their potato salad, pasta salad, tuna salad, tuna casserole, mac & cheese, sloppy joes and baked beans.

They marinate their deer and Thanksgiving turkeys in it.

The word “lettuce” does not appear even once on the Nebraska subreddit’s Dorothy Lynch page.

And Nebraska restaurants have found seemingly infinite ways to utilize the state’s beloved salad dressing, too.

Before smoking chicken, Omaha and Lincoln BBQ joints marinate it in Dorothy; both a Papillion spot and a State Fair vendor serve it as a sauce on their BBQ chicken sandwiches.

It’s a dipping sauce at Ashland’s Testicle Festival. Block 16’s Omaha Fries are topped with Wagyu sloppy joe, grilled cheese curds and Dorothy Lynch.

I found a Bloody Dorothy, and there’s Dorothy ice cream. A Dorothy Lynch-infused Orange Bundt cake once won a State Fair honorable mention.

The company website shares recipes for “Sloppy Dorothys,” “American Ghoulash” and little smokies Crockpot-ed in the dressing. It shills for Dorothy Lynch guacamole, Dorothy Lynch hummus, a Dorothy Lynch holiday cheese ball and Dorothy Lynch brownies.

What eclipses Nebraskans’ myriad uses of the dressing is their deep memory-fueled love for it.

For Erik Hustad, chef/co-owner of Honest Abe’s and Vic’s Pizza in Lincoln, consuming the dressing is like mainlining his own childhood: “Dorothy Lynch is blowing air into a Nintendo cartridge and watching “Saved by the Bell” reruns after school. It’s a pullover Chicago Bears starter jacket and taping an old baseball card to your bike so the spokes sound like a motorcycle.”

Andrew Ellicott wrote on Reddit that “taco salad without Dorty is a crime against humanity,” using one of the nicknames people have for the dressing; Dottie and DoLy are others.

Writer Rachel Mans McKenny, originally from Omaha, wrote, “In every bottle of Dorothy Lynch is the hard work of family business and the invocation of hot Nebraska summer days, with a long highway before you and rows of corn on either side.”

Ashland native and astronaut Clayton Anderson told the Columbus Telegram he used to find Dorothy at a Kroger grocery store not far from NASA headquarters in Houston.

Far-flung Cornhusker expatriates seem among those most obsessed with the dressing.

When Crete native Eldon Kohl was stationed with the Army in Germany in the 1970s, he had his brother-in-law ship him a case of “liquid gold.”

John Kastning took it from his hometown of Ponca back to Albania, where he was posted as a U.S. diplomat; he told me the moment the Dorothy-drizzled piece of iceberg hit his tongue was “instant nostalgia.”

Lincoln native Kevin Ottoson, who has lived in Japan for 20 years, told me, “That someone from Nebraska would bring me Dorothy Lynch is a fantasy of mine.”

Simply leaving the state can compel a yearning for the salad dressing of home, allegedly so much so that a former Transportation Security Administration employee claimed on Reddit that Dorothy Lynch often set off the checked baggage scanners at Eppley Airfield.

A TSA spokesperson told me, “In virtually all cases, passengers should have no problem with salad dressing bottles that are what the containers say they are … (but) there is a chance salad dressings and other food-related items packed in checked luggage may alarm.”

Although some of us smuggle the nectar of Nebraska as if it were contraband, others are not on Team Dorothy. Oscar-winning filmmaker and Omaha native Alexander Payne politely distanced himself from this particular aspect of Nebraskanness: “In my family, we never swang the Dorothy Lynch way.”

Lincoln-born Kyle Gibson, who now lives in New York, called it “salad frosting … more at home on pancakes than on iceberg.”

Grant Nonya referred to it as “orange corn syrup.”

Mark Wells, who says he has “called the DL-soaked city Omaha home for decades,” has an even stronger opinion: “The CIA should douse every bit of food provided for their prisoners in Dorothy Lynch and have them beg to be allowed to tell their secrets to be set free from the saccharine hell to which they’ve been confined.”

A Non-Scientific Experiment on the Effects of Dorothy Lynch

In the interest of research, I slipped into an unassuming dive bar in New York City’s East Village on a freezing February evening to gauge the taste buds of the uninitiated.

I carried with me some decidedly un-dive-bar-like provisions: Iceberg lettuce, hothouse tomatoes and shredded cheddar, the kind that gums up the back of your teeth. I brought ground beef sauteed with taco seasoning from a packet. I brought some broken-up Doritos.

And crucially, I carried with me a bottle of Dorothy Lynch Home Style Salad Dressing.

I was here, amid the indoor graffiti and questionable ambient smells, to offer random strangers this salad dressing on a Nebraska-style taco salad. I was here to get nostalgia-free takes from those who had never uttered Dorothy’s name.

Opinions varied wildly. 

One person found it so sweet that it was “candy-esque.” Another described it “spiced – a bit Mediterranean.”

Regular Zaim Radoncic said it reminded him of Russian dressing, but sweeter. “It’d be good if I was five years old,” he said. “It’s like ketchup.”

Yet Radoncic later came back for seconds.

Red-wine-drinker David Zavala envisioned the dressing on a “grilled pear and cheese sandwich.” England native Ellie Holbrook, who timidly covered her face while devouring

the salad, said the dressing would work well with fish and chips; Miguel Cisneros told me he’d eat it on a burrito.

And feelings of yesteryear seeped into the thoughts of Manhattan-born Grace Larsen, even though she, like the rest of the bargoers, was trying Dorothy Lynch for the first time in her life.

“It’s making me think of childhood summertime,” she said, “like I’ve just gotten out of the water and am having lunch with my family at a picnic table.”

The World’s Salad Dressing Mecca?

“Great Plains Champagne,” as Tasty Toppings is now billing Dorothy Lynch, is just one reason Nebraska may unknowingly be the country’s salad dressing epicenter: A Nebraskan created ranch, the country’s best-selling dressing since 1992. What is probably the country’s most popular sandwich that incorporates dressing, the Reuben, was invented in Omaha.

Dorothy is far from the country’s only regional dressing. Mayo-based Akron White French contains garlic, sweet onion and spicy mustard. Southeast Illinois’ Mullen’s is akin to a mild honey mustard. Garlic Expressions is a Toledo vinaigrette. Mississippi’s Comeback Sauce is the love child of ranch and BBQ.

Although Thousand Island is (surprisingly) Nebraska’s best-selling salad dressing, Dorothy Lynch is as popular as ever. The Tasty Toppings factory has expanded to 65,000 square feet and now employs 23 people. It makes the dressing, which has been gluten-free since 2010, from all U.S. ingredients. It’s always produced to order and never stored in a warehouse, CEO Marilea Hull told me.

Tasty Toppings ships out the finished product in containers as large as a gallon, though, sadly, no TSA-approved 3.4 ounce bottles.

Then it travels the globe. Local product promoter Grow Nebraska sent Dorothy Lynch to 11 countries and all 50 states last year.

During our interview, the Tasty Toppings CEO also dropped tantalizing Nebraska dressing news: The company plans to release a Dorothy/Ranch hybrid dressing later this year, which seems perfect for Nebraska. You could argue that more than scarlet and cream, Nebraska’s true colors are nuclear orange and speckled white.

The Lynch family prospered after selling the dressing that still bears the family name. 

Dorothy operated beauty salons in Grand Island and St. Paul until she retired in 1972. She died in 1975.

Neal became a serial entrepreneur, including operating a traveling magic show and running a theater in Branson, Missouri. He struck up friendships with celebrities such as Robin Williams, Wayne Newton, Ed McMahon and Don King.

He also got rich, making millions in the oil industry, according to his son Monty.

But in Neal’s mind, none of this ever eclipsed what he and his mother accomplished back in St. Paul. For the rest of his life, until he died in 2018 in Montana, he carried and gave out business cards that read: “Neal Lynch: Founder, Dorothy Lynch Salad Dressing.”

He also carried with him a secret, one that has never been published before. 

Dorothy had a cousin who lived out of state, Monty told me. They wrote letters and exchanged recipes.

The original recipe for Dorothy Lynch Home Style Salad Dressing, he said, came inside one of those letters. Postmarked Wyoming.