Last autumn, Nora Ephron’s go-to vinaigrette recipe became a major player in a celebrity scandal. In an interview with the Daily Mail (which was subsequently taken down), the former nanny of ex-couple Olivia Wilde and Jason Sudeikis conjured an indelible scene. Wilde, the nanny claimed, had been mixing up her “special salad dressing” in their kitchen – but when Sudeikis learnt that the dressing was intended for Harry Styles (who was to become, for a while, Wilde’s boyfriend), he was outraged. In a desperate bid to stop the dressing from reaching Styles, Sudeikis purportedly “lay under her car” to stop her driving away from him and their kids. “Took her salad and dressing and left them,” was what the nanny then claimed Sudeikis texted her. Both he and Wilde vehemently denied all this.
What made this dressing so “special”? Two tablespoons of Grey Poupon mustard, the same amount of good red wine vinegar, then six tablespoons of olive oil – and a soupçon of delicious literary context. Because, as became apparent when Wilde shared the ingredients on Instagram, the recipe in question was taken from the closing pages of Heartburn, Ephron’s 1983 novel. The screenwriter and director behind films like You’ve Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle might, you imagine, have sympathised with Sudeikis’s (alleged) reaction. After all, as protagonist Rachel Samstat says at the start of the book, “you don’t just bump into vinaigrettes that good”.
