The tiny chunks in the dressing are finely chopped pickles, onions, olives and hard-cooked egg. Calif. According to the Hidden Valley Web site, the owners made a dressing with herbs, spices and buttermilk in the 1950s, and the dressing caught on with their guests. The dressing was sold as a dry mix that you combined with buttermilk and mayonnaise or sour cream. Now, the Hidden Valley brand appears on several varieties of bottled ranch dressing in supermarkets. It's also a very popular dip for vegetables or chips.
French dressing is apparently an American invention.
There are several different recipes for French dressing. Most of them use ketchup, oil, vinegar and paprika. A similar dressing is called Russian, which often has chili sauce as an ingredient. Blue cheese dressing is sometimes referred to as Roquefort dressing, but Roquefort is a particular kind of blue cheese made of sheep's milk. It comes from the town of Roquefort in southwestern France.