Nope, but I will. I love Caesar salad but, like you, I've never cared for the bottled stuff. Thanks for the heads up! Wanted to make a Caesar salad while my sister is here. Is it on the aisle with the salad dressings or in the produce department? Anybody find it at Publix or Winn-Dixie?

I make my own french dressing. It is half a cup of oil, quarter cup of vinegar and a half a cup of ketchup. The original recipe called for a little sugar, but I like it without. Put it in a jar and shake it. You can also add very finely minced garlic, if you like. I also make my own Thousand Island. It is mayonnaise colored until it is light pink with Heinz Chili Sauce. Add very finely minced (or grated) boiled egg, finely chopped onions and finely minced stuffed green olives. I like it on shrimp salad. I chop up shrimp, add boiled eggs, chopped celery, onions, and dress with the dressing. I also make a regular tomato salad with all kinds of greens, cucumber, avacado slices, purple onions and add whole boiled shrimp and dress with the Thousand Island dressing I had a good recipe for Green Goddess...made in the blender, but no idea where it is. I haven't made it in years, but it was delicious. I like home made dressings much better than bottled ones.

I never eat regular thousand island dressing because I do not like sweet pickles, and so I make a version with dill or sour pickles, and I find that dressing to be more versatile. Also, I use chili sauce (without tomato) instead of ketchup. It ends up being somewhat similar to Russian dressing, which is similar to what I make for Crab Louis.

I did a lot of quick research on Imperial Sauce. Just the sauce. There were far more variations of what to put in with the crab including mushrooms, which sounds foul to me. It seems from what I can gather that the recipe was invented for making palatable canned or pre-cleaned (rather than live a minute ago) lump crab. I didn't find a real origin story or recipe, but the ingredients I posted were common to almost all of them, and to the ones that didn't have any extras, like hot sauce or the celery. A couple outliers didn't have Worcestershire. All had Old Bay, other brand Old Bay, or "seafood seasoning" aka plain wrap Old Bay. OTOH, I won't ask how old you are, but Old Bay was created in 1939. I remember we had it at home in my youth, but apparently it wasn't really marketed much outside of the Chesapeake Bay area. Probably grocers who knew it from there, or whose customers requested it, brought it in. Therefore, while most of the recipes I've found seem to be from that area, it's highly likely that versions of it made outside of Maryland would have different seasoning. OTOH, being the curious type, I did a lookup (not really research) on Newberg. I found many mentions of Lobster Newberg at Delmonico's, as well as some other origin stories, but Delmonico's version of the dish seems most famous, whatever the truth of it is. One site has this recipe from the book by the chef there who tweaked it (in all likelihood, it was originally a French dish that got its name and its tweaks at Delmonico's): "Cook six lobsters each weighing about two pounds in boiling salted water for twenty-five minutes. Twelve pounds of live lobster when cooked yields from two to two and a half pounds of meat with three to four ounces of coral. When cold detach the bodies from the tails and cut the latter into slices, put them into a sautoir, each piece lying flat, and add hot clarified butter; season with salt and fry lightly on both sides without coloring; moisten to their height with good raw cream; reduce quickly to half; and then add two or three spoonfuls of Madeira wine; boil the liquid once more only, then remove and thicken with a thickening of egg yolks and raw cream. Cook without boiling, incorporating a little cayenne and butter; then arrange the pieces in a vegetable dish and pour the sauce over." It's likely that the pastry you remember was there because the patty shell itself was wildly popular back then. Thence to Julia's lobster shells. An advantage of the lobster shells is that they're free and disposable.