Maionese
Spain and France still battle over credit for this marvelous sauce
Did you that that mayonnaise originated on the Spanish Mediterranean island of Menorca, the little sister to Mallorca? I sure didn’t, as I sat down to research this strange creamy condiment after making a batch of aioli, Spain’s garlic and olive oil based answer to store bought mayonnaise. It’s named after the island’s capital — Mahón — a pleasant seaside village of almost 30,000 that features British style Georgian houses and a naturally protected small harbor. With such a fancy French spelling — just look at that elegant double N — most people assume that mayonnaise is from France. In fact, there’s an ongoing controversy in the food world about just this.
Many say that mayonnaise is the invention of the French chef of the Duke de Richelieu in 1756. While the duke was busy battling and defeating the British at Port Mahón, his chef was working away in the kitchen creating a victory feast that involved a sauce made of cream and eggs. When the chef realized that there was no cream in the kitchen, he improvised — substituting olive oil for the missing dairy. With this, a new culinary masterpiece was born that would sweep around the world like a plague. The chef named it “Mahonnaise” in honour of the location of the Duke’s victory on Menorca.
In 2010, food writer Tom Nealon dismissed this much told and well known origin story as “ludicrous” and hypothesized that “salsa mahonesa,” which mayonnaise is called in Spain, had evolved much earlier out of the ancient Mediterranean combination of garlic and olive oil known variously as allioli, alholi and aioli — all words that combine two elements — oil and garlic — comes from the Catalan ‘all’ (garlic) and ‘oli’ (oil). Why did a French chef have to make it for it to become “invented” and furthermore: why do the French try to take credit for all things cuisine?
Allioli has been around at least since Pliny wrote about it in the first century, but it had always been extremely problematic — coaxing an emulsion out of oil, garlic, and salt is, it is almost universally agreed — nearly impossible. (Most use an immersion blender these days, but even this is difficult and requires expertise and/or practice.)
This process remained a Catalan secret for millennia for just this reason — it could hide in plain sight because it was the culinary equivalent of black magic. What had apparently happened at some point — probably during the Renaissance — was that someone added an egg and an acid to the recipe — likely lemon juice or some sort of wine vinegar. This changed everything. Now, anyone with the simple, if unlikely, instructions could now make this wonderful sauce.
They could make it because the egg yolk works as an emulsifier that pulls together the oil and the water in the lemon juice or vinegar. As biochemist Shirley Corriher puts it in her book CookWise: emulsifiers, with one end that is attracted to water and another that is attracted to oil, do two things : they coat the liquid droplets and prevent their joining together, and they change the inward pull (surface tension) of one of the liquids in the emulsion. That liquid loses its inward pull and becomes, so to speak, juicy, so that it can run between the droplets of the other liquid.
Now, just because some people along the Mediterranean coast may have stumbled into enabling this magical transformation during the Renaissance doesn’t mean they understood it or immediately inspired lots of imitators. Though chemists don’t seem to have really figured out emulsions until the 19th century, it was 17th-century French chefs who did the most to popularize the use of emulsions in cooking, therefor they claim the credit for the sauce.
Before then — writes Georgetown University historian Susan Pinkard in her book A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine, 1650–1800 — Western European cuisine was built around long-stewed combinations of meat, vegetables, fruit and spices that sound a bit like Persian or North African food today. In 17th century Paris, though, those who ran the kitchens of the wealthy began experimenting with a new kind of cooking that emphasized the flavour of individual meats and vegetables by cutting cooking times, decreasing the use of spices, and using buttery sauces that eschewed strong seasonings and aimed to let the character of the principal ingredient shine through.
In Pinkard’s telling, this change was in part an expression of the great questioning of old customs known as the Enlightenment — in part a reaction to the fact that, thanks to the explosion of the spice trade in the first half of the century, even poor people could afford cinnamon and ginger now, so the rich needed to find a new way to differentiate themselves. This evolution in cooking was also thanks to the new cooking technology that was the raised stove, which had begun appearing in French kitchens in the early 1600s and made it a lot easier to cook things requiring frequent stirring or other attention than a pot suspended over an open fire did.
Some also wonder if the arrival of forks, which began to make their way into Western Europe from the Byzantine Empire in the 13th century, and other implements suited to vigorous stirring played a role. The modern wire whisk was an invention of 19th-century Britain, but there are references to wooden precursors dating to the 16th century. You can make an emulsion a lot faster with a whisk than with a mortar and pestle.
In any case, Francois Pierre, a chef to a French nobleman who wrote under the pseudonym La Varenne, provided recipes for multiple emulsified sauces in his hugely influential 1651 cookbook Le Cuisinier Francois. One of them mixed egg yolks, an acidic liquid, and melted butter into what La Varenne called sauce blanch — what we know today as hollandaise sauce. Hollandaise and mayonnaise are basically the same thing, only one uses butter and the other olive or vegetable oil.
So while Nealon’s account of the Mediterranean aioli-based origins of mayonnaise is certainly plausible, it’s also plausible that a well-trained, 18th-century French chef plunked down on a Mediterranean island without many cows could have come up with the idea of substituting olive oil for the butter in hollandaise sauce all on his own.
Hollandaise was later classified by the famous cookbook author Auguste Escoffier as one of the five “mother sauces” of French cuisine. Mayonnaise didn’t make the list, although some people persist in thinking it should have. But while the other mother sauces are still mostly restricted to use in French dishes — with prominent exceptions such as hollandaise’s dubious dominance of weekend brunch menus in the U. S. — mayonnaise went global. It is a key element of roast beef sandwiches and maki rolls. It is served with pickled herring and with French fries.
Mayonnaise is the #1 condiment in the U.S., well ahead of ketchup, but the U.S. isn’t even a global contender as far as per capita mayo consumption. The top spot is held by Russia, where mayonnaise goes with pretty much everything, and the rest of the top ten, according to Euromonitor, is heavy on Eastern European countries. But mayonnaise is also big in Japan, in Chile, and in lots of other places. Many of these markets seem to have become saturated with mayo, though — and global consumption has declined in recent years.
What has enabled the ubiquitousness of mayonnaise is something that was discovered around the turn of the 20th century. With proper precautions, you can put the stuff in a jar and have it stay creamy and safe to eat for months or even years. One key factor in this longevity is the vinegar or lemon juice, which tends to kill off any bacteria that might crop up. Another is the remarkable binding power of those egg yolks.
A modern Spanish allioli recipe
As with all mayonnaise type sauces, making this is really all about technique. But when you master it, this sauce is leagues better than any store bought mayonnaise. This recipe makes about 1 cup (236ml).
Ingredients
1 large egg yolk (discard the white or save it for a cocktail)
4 medium cloves garlic, minced
Juice from 1/2 a lemon
Scant 1 cup (235ml) extra-virgin olive oil
Sea salt
Method
Place egg yolk, garlic, water, and lemon juice in the bottom of an immersion blender cup. Pour oil on top and allow to settle for 15 seconds.
Place head of immersion blender at bottom of cup and switch it on. As mayonnaise forms, slowly tilt and lift the head of the immersion blender until all oil is emulsified. You’ll know if it’s working or not. Sometimes it just doesn’t happen and that’s okay!
Season to taste with salt. Store in a sealed container in the refrigerator for up to two weeks.
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posted by Aloyzio Achutti at 6:02 PM
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