Olivia Wilde Drops a Hint About Her ‘Special’ Salad Dressing Recipe

Respectfully, Olivia Wilde would like you all to go toss your own salads. In an Instagram story posted Tuesday night, she even provided a dressing recipe to slather on top of it.

To understand the gravity—or perhaps the viscosity—of the salad dressing, we need to back our cabooses up about 24 hours and jump precisely one news cycle into the past. It had been a relatively unremarkable Monday until Wilde and husband Jason Sudeikis’ former nanny dropped the first in a multi-part series of bombshell interviews with the Daily Mail. (So far it’s only been two stories, but I wouldn’t put anything past the Mail.) The nanny said she was fired with no severance, and detailed several incidents in which Sudeikis allegedly yelled at her and texted her in a drunken rage. Sudeikis and Wilde responded in a joint statement, calling the interview the “unfortunate apex” of a “now 18-month-long campaign of harassing us.”

Amid the more serious allegations lay a little gem of a salad detail. The nanny alleged that Sudeikis once lay in front of Wilde’s car to stop her from leaving the house after he’d gotten wind that Wilde made her “special salad dressing” for Don’t Worry Darling co-star and now-boyfriend Harry Styles.

The internet had to know: What salad dressing could possibly be good enough to prompt such a dramatic reaction??

Wilde herself appeared to provide an answer on Tuesday night, via a photo of a page from Nora Ephron’s novel Heartburn that lists—I must say—an extremely basic red wine vinaigrette. Wilde did not confirm if the recipe was the “special” one, but the ingredients align with those she used in a 2020 Food Network special, where she made a roasted salmon salad with zucchini and potatoes and, according to an online recipe, dressed it with red-wine vinegar, Dijon mustard, honey, garlic, and olive oil.

Ephron described her dressing as a “strong vinaigrette that’s perfect for salad greens like arugula and watercress and endive.” It doesn’t sound like something I’d dive under a moving car for, but as they say, don’t yuck Jason Sudeikis’ yum.

It’s the passage at the top of the page that seems like the biggest Easter egg of all: “Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me. Because if I tell the story, it doesn’t hurt as much. Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.” Ephron’s Heartburn is an autobiographical novel about her divorce from famed journalist Carl Bernstein, involving a female protagonist who is pregnant when her husband begins to cheat on her.

In any case, it seems Wilde wants us to laugh along with her—at a salad of all things—if only as a reprieve from the chaos she’s dealing with.

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