Re-creation of local favorite salad dressing is Mooresville woman's tribute to her mother

By: Melinda Skutnick | Mooresville Tribune
Published: July 24, 2009

With her mother's homemade recipe in hand, a Mooresville woman is re-creating a once-local culinary favorite that seemingly disappeared years ago.

"Customers drove for miles to visit our restaurants for the prime rib and especially mother's bleu cheese dressing," remembered Nancy Little Hucks, who has used her mother's original recipe to create, bottle and sell Kathryn's Cottage Bleu Cheese Dressing.

Hucks' mother, Dora Blaine Little, perfected the recipe over several years in the 1950s before it became a customer favorite at various restaurants – including the former Little Kitchen, which closed one year ago – that she and her husband, Claude, operated in Mooresville and Myrtle Beach, S.C.

"Her dream when I was small was to own a restaurant and serve the finest food money could buy," said Hucks, who discussed her mother's particular love for bleu cheese dressing.

"She never found a recipe she liked totally, so she made her own, added to, took away, until she found the perfect taste and consistency," she added.

Today, more than 50 years later, Hucks has taken that recipe and made it available to the public who, she said, often inquires about her mother's unique dressing.

"So many people asked me about it," she said Wednesday, some six weeks after her first official batch made its way to several area grocers and nearly a year after a simple idea sparked a new business venture for her and her husband, Cliff.

The couple hopes to distribute and sell their original dressing throughout the Mooresville, Lake Norman and Charlotte area.

"This is the biggest tribute I could give my mother and daddy," Hucks said.
Dora died in 1996 and Claude in 2008. "It's carrying on the tradition of the Little family."
Hucks explained that the name of her dressing came from a variety of sources. "Kathryn," she said, is a family name from her mother's side. And it was Hucks' experience as a realtor and in interior design that brought the word "cottage" into the mix.

Currently, Kathryn's Cottage Bleu Cheese Dressing is being sold at several local stores, including NY Butcher Shop, Josh's Produce, Bradford Store, Shop 'N Save and McLaughlin Farmhouse Country Store.

Hucks said she hopes and plans to expand the line into Davidson and Charlotte stores by mid-fall.

Sold at both wholesale and retail, Hucks said she creates the dressing at Little Spaghetti in Mooresville – "they have been kind enough to let us use their kitchen" – as needed.

For more information on Kathryn's Cottage Bleu Cheese Dressing, contact Hucks at 704-677-4302.

Re-creation of local favorite salad dressing is Mooresville woman's tribute to her mother

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