MovieChat Forums > I Love Lucy (1951) Discussion > The Million Dollar Idea

The Million Dollar Idea


Because I'm a HUGE lover of salads, especially smothered in bleu cheese, I have always
wondered what KIND of dressing Lucy was supposed to have made so well that everyone
thought was "the best salad dressing I've ever tasted!."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there are only a limited number of salad dressings, particularly
in that era - French, Italian, thousand Island, and, of course, said bleu cheese. I don't
think ranch (which I find massively overrated) existed then.

When Ethel is pouring the dressing onto the salad, it clearly looks like some kind of
bleu cheese. Same thing when Lucy DRINKS it from the bottle. But when they're
making the dressing, the ingredients seem to be onions, salt, and oil. How would
THIS make a thick, white, creamy dressing??

Any thoughts on what this dressing was supposed to be like? I have learned in recent
years that Lucy was really drinking a milk shake out of the bottle. Which meant, of
course, she was eating lettuce with milk shake on it (YUCK!). Personally, I would rather
drink bleu cheese straight from the bottle, and have it on my salad for that scene!

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Just watched this a few times last week and I was thinking of starting a thread about it. I also LOVE bleu cheese. I like creamy Italian which is what that dressing looked like. There are a few others I like, could never stand Thousand Island though (my dad's favorite).

But yes, I really wondered too, what was in the recipe to make it look creamy? They were using a lot of oil. And I didn't get the pots on the stove. Who COOKS salad dressing? And the onions? I don't know of a salad dressing that uses onions. Maybe there are some. I just don't know any. ha!

A lot of the episode was funny. But the ending was just beyond implausible and was more impossible.

How did Lucy and Ethel lug home 1100 bottles of dressing? Okay, I guess the store delivered. But they had to find a store or several stores with that big of an inventory! Then, there was the matter of pasting their labels on the bottles. No doubt the bottles came with labels. Unless they were tiny labels and Lucy and Ethel's labels were bigger and could just be pasted over them, they'd have to remove ALL those labels.

Have you ever tried to remove ONE label from a glass jar? You have to soak it in water and then scrape it off. It takes a while. And Lucy and Ethel had to do that with over a thousand bottles.

And their delivery system, yikes! A funny sight gag, but HOW were they going to get those grocery carts down three flights of steps? Did the Mertzes building have a service elevator? And the front of the brownstone had steps anyway.

Making all those deliveries too...in New York? That's a big "town"! LOL Lucy and Ethel would have to return a number of times to get more bottles. What if some of the deliveries were in other boroughs? They'd be skating for days!

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Yes, the ending is silly, but it's an otherwise delightful episode. I also think it's funny that Lucy could talk Caroline into
getting them on live WITHOUT Charlie not checking with Ricky first ("Do these gals know what they're doing, Rick? Is
the dressing really that good?"...or words to that effect). But, of course, Ricky doesn't know anything about it when he
comes home. Still a treat, though.

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Never thought about Caroline getting them on Charlie's TV station so fast. In this episode she had a lot of influence on him. Maybe she just nagged him into it. ha!

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