A lot – nay: a veritable ocean - of rubbish has been
written about Mayonnaise in the cookbooks of this sorry world. About where it
comes from, how it ought to be made, who invented the name on what inane occasion,
and worst of all: how it may be improved by tearing its bowels out. As
promised: we will get to that latter chapter of Nixing Mayo in a week or two. But for now I merely wish to go back
to basics, and discuss with you the Origins of the Golden Sauce.
Grandpa Géronime, with whom you didn’t wanna
mess!
Cookbooks are
notorious nonsense-mongers. They have no scruples and care not about Truth.
Take, for instance, such an innocent and picturesque fiction as the following
from The Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer-Becker
(Indiana, 30th edition, 1971): “The making of a perfect mayonnaise
is the Sunday job for Papa in France and rivalry for quality between households
is intense”. This, dear reader, is an observation which can only be written down
with a straight face by someone who has never ever seen the workings of a
French family from the inside, except in a Jacques Tati movie. Admittedly, my own Grandpa Géronime (as you surely
know: I am half-French on my mother’s side) knew how to whip up a more than
decent Mayonnaise when the spirits caught him. But then: he was a natural. He
whipped his wife, his sons, my mother and me at the least occasion and I can
assure you that his belt was as capable as his whisk. But the notion that the
old man would go hopping out of the house, carrying a bowl of freshly made Mayo
to show off to the neighbours, is so very absurd that, on pain of a heart
attack, I must do my best not to get the picture into my head! Why: he’d take a
shotgun into their kitchen before he’d give their children a crust of bread! As
a matter of fact, during the war…. But that’s another story, and I shouldn’t
stray too much from my subject.
So who invented Mayonnaise, that Divine and
Golden Sauce, and whence its name? Ay, get yourself three cookbooks, dear
reader, and you will end up with four fine explanations, each one of
them irrefutably true. The most current, and most bizarre story, tells how
The Sauce was first invented during Marshall Richelieu's 1756 siege of Port
Mahon on the Balearic island of Minorca. One day, the army cook discovered
there was no food left in the pantry to feed his roughly 20,000 red-blooded
soldier boys, except that he still had - yes, how did you guess? – some Oil
and some Eggs. What could he do, dear
reader, but grab a mixing bowl, and invent Mayonnaise?
This he then served to the starving army, who - satisfied with the fare -
happily ran off to bash in Hispanic heads and lop off limbs, and do all those
other charming things that soldiers engage in. After which the now popular sauce was duly
called after the site of the siege: Mahonnaise, hence Mayonnaise
after a little Rococo French scrambling.
Logical, right?
Well, No!! Not at all! Not in the freaking least!
Let us perform a small exercise of empathy. Let
us just imagine you were a cook, and you had oil and eggs, and a threatening
famine on your hands among 20,000 brutal, savage, heavily armed mercenaries…
Then what, I wonder, would you
do? Yes, of course: you'd cook them an ample supply of fried eggs and
omelettes! You wouldn't go wasting all that healthy, filling egg-white, only to
serve your customers a dish which they did not know, might not like, and – we
can be pretty sure of this - would not know how to appreciate!
And now imagine that you were one of those hungry
heavily armed bloodthirsty soldiers, and – coming to the kitchen - got onto
your plate some non-descript yellow goo, while you were expecting a nice big
juicy steak? What would you have done? Exactly: you would have taken
out your broadsword, chopped around a little, and eaten the cook! And thus, the
secret of that new-fangled recipe for yellow slush would have disappeared forever
into the oblivion of an army's bowels!
French troops at Port Mahon coming in for lunch at the
kitchen
To put it differently: this story stinks and I do
not buy it (the more so, since it makes no mention anywhere of mustard,
pepper, salt, or lemon... And what cook in his right mind would even DREAM of making
a Mayonnaise without those essentials?)
No, dear reader: this is not how it went. Nor am
I much impressed by the alternatives. Take the fairly similar fib found in the New Basic Cookbook by Mss Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins (New York,
1989). On page 24 these two ladies scribble that ‘during the reign of Henri IV
of France, a sauce that had no other name than “cold sauce” was popular. One
day, the Duke of Mayenne refused to leave his chicken salad with cold sauce to
go to battle. France lost the battle, but the sauce, now named mayonnaise after the duke, became
legendary.’ A likely story! It is, after all, a famous time-proven habit of the
French to call their most glorious accomplishments after their most dismal
defeats… (as is shown, for instance, by their use of the word Water-Loo
for toilets)!
Enough! Let me
cut through the crap! The fact is that we do not know who was Our Benefactor,
that Edison of the Kitchen, that Einstein of Gastronomy, to whom we owe the
invention of Mayonnaise. Why in the world is that so hard to accept? Of some of
the most glorious inventions of human kind – the wheel, writing, the missionary
position – we ignore the creators; while other, less pleasant ones – the
condom, the guillotine and the Kalashnikov submachine gun – enjoy a known paternity. Who
cares, I say; as long as we give daily thanks to the boy or girl who first
whipped oil into an egg yolk, and knew he or she was on to something!?
As for the name
of the Golden Sauce, it must be granted that the etymological dispute has not
yet been definitely settled. The word
Mayonnaise, to the best of my knowledge, derives from the old medieval French
for ‘egg yolk’, namely: Mayeu
(or Moyeu). Hey, how about that? That might make some sense, wouldn’t it? Unfortunately, there
are some arguments against this, one of them being that the spelling Mayonnaise
is not attested before 1807 (when medieval French had gone out of fashion); another that until deep into the 19th
century, the sauce was also referred to as ‘Magnonnaise’, which on
phonological grounds pretty much excludes ‘mayeu’ as a root. Be that as it may,
when in the darkness we must grope, I still prefer the Yolk Theory to all
alternatives, such as the laughable one that derives the word from the southern
town of Bayonne (a theory which to my immense surprise is particularly popular
among culinary authors born in… Bayonne!), or the lamentable one
proposed by the great Carême, who in his standard five volume cookbook, could
do no better than to propose that Mayonnaise came from the verb ‘manier’, i.e.
‘to handle, to twiddle, to fiddle around’.
HEY, BUT WAIT, I hear you clamour, dear
reader. What kind of cookbook is this, Maître? One of words only? One without food?
Have you forgotten you owe us a recipe for the weekend, so that we may Impress
Through Simplicity our guests and our loved ones?
No, my friends,
I have not forgotten! I am – as you should know by now – an upright man, the real thing, the genuine product: a Democrat, a Socialist, a European, and a Cook.
So I will not disappoint you, and I offer you here the promised recipe. One
which will surprise you, which may make history, and which is in perfect
keeping with my little exposé above. To wit:
Nuggets
of Deep-fried French Chef in Breadcrumbs
To make this
savoury dish, you will need the following ingredients and tools:
1 plump French cook. The best specimens reputedly come from the
region of Isle-de-France, where they are lovingly bred for use in restaurants
like Maxim’s and Le Meurice. The best ones are called François and weigh about 170
pounds. Take care: fresh French Chefs should not be kept close to bottles of
alcoholic beverage, which spoils them; or to a typewriter, which may result in
an unwanted cookbook.
A deep fryer with new oil
2 spoonfuls of wheat flour and 1 egg
per kilo of meat
An ample amount of simple
supermarket breadcrumbs
A spoon
A plastic bag
Ask your butcher
to chop the meat into small pieces (roughly table-tennis ball size). Scrub the pieces
well (French chefs do not always come as clean as desired). Make a mixture of
salt, freshly ground black pepper, a little cumin and some ginger powder. Sprinkle
this over the pieces. Let the meat sit a while.
Coat the pieces
with flour. The easiest way to do this is by putting a good spoonful of flour
into a small plastic bag. Drop one or two of the pieces of meat into the bag
and toss around. Repeat the process until all chunks are coated.
Crack the egg
into a bowl. Whip up until fluid. Drag the chunks through the egg and then
through breadcrumbs. Set aside and let the breadcrumbed chunks dry for about an
hour. One coating of breadcrumbs is usually enough, but if you wish, you can repeat
the process. There are knowledgeable cooks who prefer to do the second coating
with a mixture of egg and breadcrumbs, which turns out thicker and more stable.
Heat the oil slowly. Remember that the meat
must be cooked all the way through, without the breadcrumbs turning black! So
aim for a temperature which just sizzles. Calmly deep-fry the nuggets until
golden. Serve with a dip like light mayonnaise (no kosher prohibition against
dipping pieces of French cook in his own Mayonnaise is known to me, and I’m an
expert on ancient languages and civilizations).
An early variety of French Chef Nuggets cooked on a
bamboo grill
(From: Les Victimes
de la Gastronomie, Anonymous, 1566)
Nota Bene: I am aware that
among my readers there are overly sensitive housewives who object to the eating
of foie gras, baby veal and French
cooks. What can I say? Except in the bedroom, one should never induce the
average housewife to be adventurous. To those of my readers who belong to this lot, I can only say: You don’t know what you’re missing, dear… But if you
must, you may substitute the French Chef with a good plump chicken. It will not
come out the same, but it will spare you that man-eating feeling you wish to
reserve for Hubby.
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