Two years ago, in the summer of 2012, I made
a short visit to my dearly beloved Motherland, Southern
France, after an absence of a considerable while (which – I assure you - had
nothing at all to do with that little pending
business of the Paris Interior Ministry concerning the precise state of my political loyalties during the
German occupation back in the war years, as the Times Culinary Complement has
recently suggested!) I went mainly for pleasure and rest, dear reader: to visit
my Ex-en-Provence, to have a Nice time, To Lose a few bucks at the local
roulette tables, to paint the town Orange, and so on and so forth. But I also visited
for more serious reasons: to check up on the general direction the old country
is taking, and foremost, naturally, to investigate that utterly supreme and all-important
subject: The State of Mayonnaise in
France (for the prominent role which She played in the genesis of the
Golden Sauce see this here earlier article).
Well, what can I
say, dear reader? La Douce France of
my youth is obviously going down the drain. The place is nearly unrecognizable.
If anything, it now looks like a particularly poor chunk of the American
Midwest where for some odd reason the local bigwigs have decided to change the lingua franca to, well, French… (Did you
know, by the by, that shortly after the American Revolution, the US Rebels were
so very fed up with the British that Congress earnestly discussed changing the
national language to German?? Imagine what this world would look like today if
they’d gone down that sour Kraut road…!)
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| A French village, as it used to be... |
There are now
hamburger joints everywhere, dear reader! In the countryside restaurants are few
and far between and bloody ALL OF THEM offer PIZZA, for crying out loud! At the
same time it is of course rigorously forbidden to smoke anywhere in a bar or a
bistro – for we may despise the Yanks, but my, don’t we love to imitate their
every idiocy! Parking prohibitions condemn the innocent motorist to perennial motion,
as he cannot stop for a second without generating parking tickets automatically
allotted by sneaky closed circuit cameras in the pay of the National Treasury.
There are myriads of Megastores (a.k.a. to our American cousins as ‘malls’) in every village, even the smallest
ones. No longer does the crumbling church spire bid you welcome you to an amiable communauté… No: what meets the eye as you drive in is a Mondrian skyline
of megalomaniac cubes containing Intermarché, E. Leclerc, Casino and all the evil
rest of them… Naturally, these have driven out, crushed, bankrupted and
exterminated all small shops, so that each village looks like a ghost town
where the average age hovers around 85. The only places that still show any
sort of social life are horrid tourist traps like, for instance, Les Beaux (a
little hilltop town that once gave rise to the name for Bauxite aluminium ore).
Formerly a charming medieval hamlet gently forgotten by the rotten world, it is
now filled to the brim with a human mudslide of half-dressed rabble, which
moves chomping and gulping with wide-open mouths through
shoddily restored streets defaced by souvenir shops that sell tea towels printed
with pictures showing you how very cute the place was before every building contained
a souvenir shop selling tea towels…
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| The French village, as it is today... |
And so on and so forth. It turns out that the true Défi Americain was to catch up as fast
as we could with the Horrid Taste From Across The Ocean… And its true Writer was merely a Servant (let’s see how many of you get this joke!)
Fortunately some things, the TRULY WORTHWHILE
THINGS, never changed. And guess what has changed least (and is
therefore worthwhilest of them all…)?!
Yeah, you guessed it: Mayonnaise! French Mayonnaise!
Other than in the rest of Europe (not to
mention post-communist Eastern Europe!) France never succumbed to the onslaught
and virtual monopoly of the Three Mammoth Brands: Hellmans, Kraft and Calvé (soon
I will dedicate a post to their imperialist doings, dear reader; as soon, that
is, as Mr Snowdon sends me his views on the matter). No: France developed, and sold,
and ate, and KEPT its own national brands. These were always many, but three
stood out as savoury rocks in a raging sea: Amora,
Benedicta, and Lesieux. Today we will dedicate a few words to the first of these
gorgeous Three Graces.
F1. Amora. Paris, 1981. Price unknown; 425
ml/400 gr.
Mustard - a mild mustard, not one which
comes armed with hypodermic needles or a free sadistic acupuncturist - is in
our opinion essential to all Mayonnaise. And as mustard is a favourite of the
French (happy, happy nation...!) the Amora corporation – biensûr: de Dijon!
– put 1 and 1 together and generated a long tradition of mustard-rich Mayo, which
works splendidly. Nomen Being Omen, we simply Love this brand. It
is not fit to accompany all dishes, nor apt to be eaten at all hours of the
day. But an Oeuf Mayonnaise prepared with Amora is a guaranteed success!
Sad that the producer opted to mutilate his label with no fewer than three ugly
yellow bottles announcing ‘45% extra’ and a big Gratuit. It tires the
eye, and is redundant! Good Mayo needs no bush!
F3. Amora. Paris, 1982. Price unknown;
262 ml/250 gr.
This somewhat later label of the same fine brand provides
us with a good occasion to draw our readers’ attention to the large differences that
exist between the sorts of victuals depicted on national Mayonnaise-labels. In
France, next to the customary vegetables and hard boiled eggs, cold meat
appears considerably more frequently and in a more prominent place than elsewhere
on the globe. Also, the French – ah, happy, happy nation! – exceptionally
include lobsters, avocado's and artichokes in their pictorial selection. One
sees, at a glance, what Great Nation invented Mayonnaise and guarded its
hallowed traditions! And what nation does most honour to the Golden Sauce.
F16. Amora ‘de Dijon’. France, October 2011. € 1,39 for 235 gr.
And, praise where it is more than due: as the
label was gradually changed over the decades, the strength, beauty and
character of this excellent brand was strictly maintained. Amora in the 21st
century was still as mustardy as always, as robust, as fierce… as… as… Divine! Even if there were some ominous
signs of capitulation to health food manias on the label, such as the
disappearance of all of yesteryear’s cold meats (has Cholesterolophobia taken
root even in the land of Foie Gras???),
and a laudable, but rather suspect emphasis on the ‘roughly 310,000 hens’ which
are guaranteed free range happiness throughout the year due to the charity of Amora
Mayonnaise. We are happy for those chicken. But… let not thy left egg know what
thy right egg is doing, we softly mumble…
