Did you ever wish you could bottle your memories? Nancy Hucks of Davidson has done it with a bottle of blue cheese dressing.

For years, Hucks’ parents, Claude and Dora Blaine Little, were in the restaurant business in Mooresville. They started in 1952 with a dime-store lunch counter on the square called Delk’s. In 1968, they opened a bigger restaurant, The Little Kitchen, that became popular for prime rib and blue cheese dressing.

Coming up with a great blue cheese dressing was an obsession for Hucks’ mother, she says. Every week, the family would drive to Charlotte to eat at a steakhouse called Swain’s across from the studios of WBT-TV. Her mother kept asking what was in the dressing, then worked at it until she came up with her own version.

The restaurant developed a following, Hucks says. “We had people from everywhere that came to try two things, the prime rib and Mother’s blue cheese dressing.” Once, Hucks recalls, they caught a woman at the salad bar with a jar she was filling with dressing. Claude was polite but firm: She could only have enough for her salad, but she could buy a bottle to take home.

In the 1980s, the Littles retired to Myrtle Beach and opened another restaurant, Little’s at the Beach. Hucks’ mother took the original recipe there, too. Hucks’ ex-husband bought The Little Kitchen in Mooresville and ran it until last year. He still made blue cheese dressing, but not exactly the same as her mother’s.

“It makes so much,” she says. “It makes 5 gallons at a time. It’s very, very expensive to make it. You cannot cut corners.”

Today, Hucks is a Realtor. But last July, she decided it was time to do something with her mother’s recipe. She started a business, Kathryn’s Cottage Kitchen, to make her mother’s blue cheese and Thousand Island dressings exactly the way her mother made them.

“I don’t think there’s any better tribute to my mother and daddy than to sell this salad dressing,” Hucks says. “I’m very proud of my heritage, and I’m very proud that they were able to provide people with something they’d drive for miles to get.”

Want Dressing?

Kathryn’s Cottage Dressings are available online, at
www.kathrynscottagekitchen.com, or at number of local stores, including the Bradford Store in Huntersville, Josh’s Farmers Market, Shop N Save and McLaughlin’s Farmhouse Country Store in Mooresville, and at Dean and Deluca and Reid’s Fine Foods in Charlotte. Prices range from $6.50 to $10.50.

Dora Blaine’s Chicken Tetrazzini

Nancy Hucks certainly won’t part with her mother’s blue cheese dressing recipe. But she will share another popular dish her mother made at The Little Kitchen in Mooresville.

1 chicken fryer or 4 bone-in chicken breasts
Salt and pepper
1/4 cup (1/2 stick) butter
1 cup chopped celery
3/4 cup chopped onion
1/2 cup chopped green pepper
1 small box thin spaghetti or vermicelli
3 cups grated cheddar cheese, divided
1 (10.5-ounce) can cream of mushroom soup

Place chicken in a pot and add just enough water to cover. Add salt and pepper to taste. Bring to a simmer and cook until chicken is cooked through. Remove chicken, saving cooking liquid, and set aside until cool enough to handle. Remove from bone, discarding skin, and cut meat into chunks.

Melt butter in a large saute pan. Add celery, onion and green pepper and cook until just tender.

Cook spaghetti in the leftover broth from cooking the chicken. Drain and mix with sauted vegetables, cooked chicken, soup and 1 1/2 cups cheese. Spread in a large 13-by-9-inch baking dish or 2 smaller casserole dishes. Top with remaining cheese and bake at 350 degrees for 35 to 40 minutes. (Casserole can be cooled, wrapped well and frozen.)