It was really some weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, I was dreaming of having some Corral Salad Dressing for a tasty salad I was about to eat.
What exactly is Corral Salad Dressing?
By Maylon Rice
Saline River Chronicle Feature Contributor
Well, Warren residents from another generation or two, know of this magical red, sweet concoction to be sparingly drizzled out on a fresh garden salad, I speak of.
Others, as in these younger generations, sadly, do not.
Corral Salad Dressings, a homemade salad dressing, was a forerunner to all the thicker “Ranch” or orangey “French” or even that still thicker cousin of “Thousand Island” salad dressings back when even the most commercial salad dressing companies had but one, two or three different flavors on the store shelves.
Just the other day at the world’s largest retailer here in Northwest Arkansas there are some 100 or more different companies stocking the 60-foot aisle. I would imagine at least 300-400 different types of flavors, ingredients, and consistencies to be spread over a bowl of salad.
Corral Salad Dressing was a forerunner of the Thousand Island or French Salad Dressings often found back then on store shelves.
Today’s hundreds of vinaigrettes and other salad dressings, featuring even well-known restaurant chain names, can’t stand up to this simple salad dressing.
And do not even get me started on the plethora of “sauces” for dipping a chicken wing or chicken tender (whatever part of a feathered chicken that is) into before you eat.
Just add another 30 feet to the salad dressing aisle in the big box store for those and other so-called today’s “barbecue” sauces.
After an attempt or two to get the exact recipe, a friend from Warren found it among his late mother’s recipe cards, scribbled notes, and dog-eared recipe books.
The Corral Salad Dressing was a concoction from the able and talented kitchen of Dorothy Peebles Wisener.
She was the co-owner of the Corral with her husband W. K. (known as Kay) Wisener and assisted the head cook, Robert Louis Anderson. As with most of the recipes found in the family’s uniquely shaped restaurant out now the Bradley County Fairgrounds and the once thriving Pink Tomato Sales Markets out in West Warren, they were homemade.
Made on site. Fresh and oh, so wonderful.
The Corral featured not only drive-up, car-hop type service, but a to-go window and an indoor dining area, with also a private dining area often used as overflow when the restaurant was busy.
Man oh, man could Kay Wisener cook, but so could his brother Wayne.
Both men, for years, catered nearly every Junior/Senior Proms, WHS athletic banquets, and many other community dinners all around Warren and Bradley County. Not only could they do the logistics of cooking outside their restaurant kitchens, but man, could they do a culinary feast.
My junior year, they spent most of the day toiling over two-barrel shaped grills outside the old Warren gymnasium back the back of the old high school, over bacon wrapped fillet minions that were “melt in your mouth good.”
Sadly, many of my classmates have never seen, much less tasted such fine beef served up with twice-baked potatoes and I think equally roasted asparagus spears and baked and spiced apple rings.
Many plates were left, simply uneaten.
Kay was an absolute expert at grilling steaks. He was often, late at night while the old tomato auction shed operated, grilling up big sirloins for the out of town produce buyers and their truck drivers after midnight.
He also cooked the possibly best pork chop I have ever eaten, a generous butter-flayed fillet of one inch-and-half thick premium 16-ounce pork chop to come off a little 55-gallon barrel grill off to the side of the brown Corral building.
It would literally melt in your mouth and you could cut it with the side of a fork – no steak knife needed.
I can still taste that pork chop today with only a hint of garlic and sweetened butter,
Nothing yet has met that grilling standard and I’ve eaten at some famous and pricey steak houses all over Arkansas (Coy’s in Hot Springs, Herman’s in Fayetteville and even the Hamilton House) or its Mississippi rival, the original Doe’s Eat Place in Greenville.
It was the cooking of Ms. Dorothy that is legendary in this Pastime when it comes to the Corral Salad Dressing. But she was so much more in the Warren community.
A lifelong Methodist, she was a force in Warren.
She was a wife, mother and businesswoman.
She knew the insurance and credit union business as well as working at the Bradley County Medical Center in various administrative positions under her retirement at age 85. She, sadly, passed from our midst in November of 2019.
A tribute to her, the outstanding rose garden at the hospital is in her memory.
But I’ll always remember her Corral Salad Dressing. It’s nothing fancy, simple to make, but oh, so delicious.
Corral Salad Dressing
- 1 cup of mayo
- ¼ to ½ cups of ketchup
- 1 teaspoons of garlic powder
- 1 teaspoons of black pepper
- 2 tablespoons of Worchester sauce.
- Stir it well.
- Refrigerate briefly, but keep it room temperature to serve.
The dressing on a salad, especially one with Bradley County pink tomatoes in the spring and summer is outstanding.
But with so much food and so many flavors this holiday season, the Corral Salad Dressing was a Pastime worth making, sharing, and drizzling across my salads.