Why hello there, and welcome to Kitchen Catastrophe, where one man wages an ongoing war against the ancient enemy of man: history. Those who do not learn from it are doomed to repeat it, but there’s a lot of history, and it can get pretty dry. I’m your Moist-Maker of Yore, Jon O’Guin. And today’s topic…Look, I straight up do not know if this is going to WORK, but we’re going to try it anyway. Today, we’re talking about Mayonnaise in its many forms: American, Japanese, English, Italian, Spanish, and other.

And let’s get to that “other” first, because it technically unites Italy AND Spain, and may serve as the starting point for the whole bunch. And that start is Aioli, or alli-i-oli, or any of a dozen weird spellings. Back in the 1300’s, this stuff turns up. I think I covered it in the Burger Sauce post, but in case I didn’t, (I’m certainly not going to waste my time reading things that I wrote. Those thoughts came from me, have been set into the world, and therefore no longer have value to me. The O’Guin family principle.) IN CASE I DIDN’T, originally, aioli was just salt, garlic, and olive oil. You mashed the garlic into paste, and BEAT the olive oil into it forming a kind of fluffy sauce. Like whipped cream, except the exact opposite.

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I was going to joke that you wouldn’t want to put this on most pies, but honestly, thinking about the number of savory pies, I don’t know if that’s mathematically correct.

This is going on in a very particular part of the world called “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-“ Sorry, that went weird. See, this is before the Treaty of Westphalia, which formed the modern idea of “states” as things separate and enduring beyond the rulership of local nobility. Back in these days, you could, over the course of a couple years, technically leave in 6+ different kingdoms, as people died, gave up lands due to debts or wars, passed the lands off to different heirs, etc. The land was not part of a cultural entity, but the property of nobles. So this area is the Catalan/Provencal region, basically the northwest coast of the Mediterranean, from like, northeast Italy through southern France and into northeast Spain.

So this sauce exists, and it’s getting little tweaks here and there: a version with lemon juice pops up, a version with eggs, and it’s easy to understand why: aioli is just an emulsion of olive oil, air, and garlic. We’ve DEFINITELY talked about emulsions before, but to recap: an emulsion is a combination of liquids that cannot dissipate into each other, combined so that one of the liquids is held in a relatively homogenous suspension throughout the other. A mildly off-putting example is milk: milk is a mixture of water, milk-fat, and milk-solids. If you try, you can “break” the suspension, which is how you get curds and whey, and eventually cheese: you get the fat and solids to fall out of the water.

The thing is: lemon juice, with its acidity, is going to help break down the components, allowing the mixture to emulsify more easily, and eggs have a natural protein structure that makes them VERY good at emulsifying. (Basically, it’s like a magnet, where one end attracts water, and another attracts fats, causing them to get stuck together for a more even suspension.)

It looks like Mike Wazowski’s basketball-playing cousin, and interestingly, a similarly shaped compound is also how soap works: one end bonds to water, the other bonds to dirt.

Now, that goes on for some time, until Mayonnaise appears…MYSTERIOUSLY.

The Magical Mush of Mayo

As we briefly touched on in our post on the surprisingly complicated history of chicken salad, history does not definitively record when, exactly, mayonnaise was invented. It just kind of…starts showing up in cookbooks in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s. The most popular explanation is an interesting one: in the mid 1700’s, a siege took place on the isle of Menorca, one of the Balearic islands. Since you’ve almost certainly never heard of that chain, and MIGHT have heard of Menorca, or the largest island in the chain, Mallorca, (and probably know about the THIRD island: Ibiza, if for no other reason than the Mike Posner song a couple years ago) it’s worth noting they sit about 100 miles offshore of Northeast Spain/Southern France.

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Yes, I too was surprised to find myself talking about pop music in a discussion of Mayonnaise.

The CAPITOL of Menorca is Mahón, and the story goes that, to celebrate the victory, a chef whipped up a luscious sauce for the Duke of Richelieu, and dubbed it “sauce mahonaise” or “Mahonese sauce” in…”French”. There’s just a couple little issues with this idea: the first is that a couple people technically invented it beforehand: the siege of Mahon was in 1756, and a Valencian monk published a recipe that is functionally mayonnaise about 6 years before that, naming it aioli bo. And in France, someone had invented a similar sauce about 14 years before the siege. However, it’s worth noting that these details don’t necessarily mean the famous story is COMPLETELY wrong. Perhaps the cook made Richelieu HIS version of the sauce, and named it “Mahonnaise”. Or maybe it’s a classic case of “the duke told people “this is the sauce I ate while in Mahon”, and then people went around asking for “Mahon sauce”.

An interesting detail is that the next several famous recipes for “mahonnaise” make it notably different, treating it like an aspic rather than a true sauce. Aspic is (and I regret to put this image in your head given the context) but “savory jello, for coating meats” You know like, the Jello-salad with chunks of fruit in it? Imagine the jell-o was mayo-flavored, and the fruit was chunks of chicken, or something. It also undergoes a name change, as the writer at the time, a Frenchman in 1808, asserts that Mahonaise is a DUMB name, because it’s “not French”, and because the filthy Menorcas don’t make good food. OBVIOUSLY, he asserts, it’s supposed to be Bayonnaise, after the city of Bayonne, which makes great food. Which is…Look, I don’t speak MODERN French, I sure as hell don’t speak 17th Century French. But I will note that by the rules of French as I understand them, he’s talking out his ass on the first accusation. –aise is the STANDARD suffix for feminine French demonyms. Like, the word ‘French’, IN French, is francais when referring to male nouns, and francaise when referring to feminine ones. Anglaise is the word for “English”. So unless he’s arguing that French people call the city of Mahon something else (which he MIGHT have been: the city was also known as Mao in some languages), it’s pretty clearly a sold French word.

So, we get mayonnaise, which is an emulsion of egg, vinegar or lemon juice, and olive oil: basically the same thing as aioli, but with eggs instead of garlic.

They do LOOK kind of similar, I guess.

Is that the end of our story? Pretty close, but not quite

Variety is the Spice of White

That pun is disturbingly pleasing to me. Before we go, I wanted to touch on a couple regional variations of Mayonnaise, and one irritating taxonomic detail. We’ll start with the detail: mayonnaise vs Aioli. As might be expected when one of the dishes was potentially first named as a VARIATION of the other, there’s a lot of disagreement on what, exactly, is an aioli, or a mayonnaise. Some aioli purists hold that only garlic, oil, and salt are acceptable. Some allow eggs as long as their POINT is to just help the sauce bind, others allow lemon juice. IN the US and UK, a lot of the time, ‘aioli’ is just used as a stand-in for “fancy flavored mayo, typically with at least SOME garlic added.” There’s no perfect line to draw, so I like to think of them as different cultivars of the same species.

Speaking of which…

HOLLANDAISE: On the same lines, and adding to the confusion with everything we just talked about, Hollandaise is, essentially, “Mayonnaise with three ingredients slightly changed”: butter instead of olive oil, egg yolks instead of eggs, and more robust spices like cayenne and nutmeg. Complicating matters is that the first appearance of “Dutch Sauce” is BETWEEN Aioli and Mayonnaise, showing up in the 1650s. Is it the missing link? Is Mayonnaise actually a rip-off of Hollandaise, not aioli? NO ONE KNOWS, but weirdly no one else seems to be suggesting it either. I mean, the Netherlands were, at the time, overlapping with several regions that are now considered French. I think it’s more like, “converging ideas”: everyone in the region was playing with the same general ingredients, and found out that “oil, acid, flavoring (eggs?)” was a working combination for a good sauce.

JAPANESE MAYO: As we mentioned on Monday, Japan uses its own special system, almost always using only egg yolks, and relying on different vinegars such as rice or malt. Japan, as with many countries, also has maintained the idea of “mayonnaise as sauce” better than America, where it’s normally treated as a sandwich spread or dressing for certain composed salads.

MIRACLE WHIP: Miracle Whip was a recipe to make “Mayonnaise, but cheaper” during the Great Depression, which it originally did by mixing mayonnaise with a cheaper salad dressing made with soybean oil and corn syrup instead of olive oil. (Soybeans and corn are HUGE American crops, since we discovered that rotating between the two keeps soil healthier.) adding spices to make the different flavor taste more palatable, including dried garlic, ground mustard*, and supposedly up to 18 other spices. Today, while it definitely TASTES different than normal mayo, the fact that most US mayo is made using vegetable oil, and Miracle whip uses eggs, means that the two are basically just different recipes of the same dish.

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Yeah, that’s about the response I expected for that comment.

MUSTARD: Fun science fact, Mustard has a lot of the same emulsifying properties as eggs do, in terms of binding fats and water. So it’s little surprise that many mayonnaise recipes or variants rely on mustard in one way or another, since it just makes the dish more stable.

SALAD CREAM: That cheaper salad dressing mentioned in the Miracle Whip section MIGHT have been a reference to an American variant of “Salad Cream”, a dressing/sauce still eaten in Britain, which is…well, very weird. Old school recipes called for blending hard-boiled eggs with cream, mustard, salt and vinegar. Nowadays, it’s made with oil, water, vinegar, and egg yolk…making it basically the English version of Japanese Mayo.

And that should be more than you, or really anyone, should ever need to know about Mayonnaise. Other than, I guess “how to make it”, but let’s leave that for now. There’s dozens of recipes online, and personally, I haven’t yet found one REALLY worth the extra effort of making it rather than just having some in the fridge.

MONDAY: JON, RESPECTFULLY, SERVES UP DISH THAT MIGHT BE HARD TO EXPLAIN. IT’S PROBABLY GOING TO BE FRIED CHICKEN. JUST…HEAR HIM OUT ON THIS.

THURSDAY: DUNNO.