Mayonnaise

Mayonnaise is a stable emulsion of vegetable oil and egg yolk, flavored with vinegar or lemon juice and frequently mustard (all of which help the emulsion). Other seasonings call for other names (see below).

Mayonnaise is one of the mother sauces of classic French cooking, so it is the base for many other chilled sauces and salad dressings. For example:

Aioli is olive oil mayonnaise combined with garlic.
Tartar sauce is mayonnaise spiced with pickled cucumbers and onion. Capers, olives, and crushed hardboiled eggs are sometimes included.
Russian dressing (also known as Marie Rose sauce in Europe) is mayonnaise with tomato sauce or ketchup and yoghurt or heavy cream added.
Thousand Island dressing is Russian dressing with pickles and herbs.
Tuna sauce is mayonnaise with tuna steaks, capers and anchovies.
Fry sauce is a mixture of mayonnaise, ketchup, and spices, commonly eaten on french fries, especially in the U.S. state of Utah
Mayonesa is a lime-flavored mayonnaise, usually found in Mexican or Spanish grocers' in North America.

Mayonnaise is commonly used as sandwich spread in North America; on chips in northern Europe (especially in the Low Countries, though increasingly in the United Kingdom and France) and in parts of Canada and Australia; on cold chicken or hard-boiled eggs in France; and on sushi, chicken, okonomiyaki, yakisoba, and pizza in Japan. It is also eaten in competitive eating contests.

Making mayonnaise

Mayonnaise is made by slowly adding oil to an egg yolk, mustard, vinegar, and salt. Mustard helps to keep the emulsion stable while whisking vigorously to disperse the oil into the liquid. Egg yolk contains lecithin, which acts as the emulsifier. All ingredients are added at the beginning of the process to prevent speckles. Adding the salt after emulsification can cause white speckles.

These steps produce the basic mayonnaise. The Wiki Cookbook has more elaborate varieties, and a more thorough description of the process. Mayonnaise can be made with an electric mixer, an electric blender, or a food processor, or by hand with a whisk or even a fork. Using a whisk or fork, however, involves fairly tedious physical effort. Blenders and food processors are by far the quickest means of making mayonnaise, however the end result is inferior to a hand-whisked product.

Adding a bit of mustard will stabilise the emulsion. This is because the small particles it contains serve as nucleation sites for the droplets forming the mayonnaise.

Traditional recipe

The traditional French recipe is essentially the same as the basic one described above, but it uses top-quality olive oil and vinegar. Some nouvelle cuisine recipes specify safflower oil. It is considered essential to constantly beat the mayonnaise using a whisk while adding the olive oil a drop at a time, fully incorporating the oil before adding the next tablespoon. Experienced cooks can judge when the mayonnaise is done by the emulsion's resistance to the beating action. Mayonnaise made this way may taste too strong or sharp to people accustomed to commercial products: in such a case it can be made blander by blending in some non-fat yoghurt.

Composition

Homemade mayonnaise can approach 85% fat before the emulsion breaks down; commercial mayonnaises are more typically 70-80% fat. "Low fat" mayonnaise products contain starches, cellulose gel, or other ingredients to simulate the texture of real mayonnaise.

Homemade mayonnaise can also be made using raw egg whites, with no yolks at all, at least if it is done at high speed in a food processor. The resulting texture appears to be the same, and – if properly seasoned with salt, pepper, mustard, lemon juice, vinegar, and a little paprika – it tastes similar to traditional mayonnaise made with egg yolks.

Since homemade mayonnaise contains raw egg yolks, it subjects the consumer to the small risk of infection with Salmonella enteriditis (the risks of infection from using eggs in the USA is detailed in ^*). Commercial producers either pasteurize the yolks, freeze them and substitute water for most of their liquid, or use other emulsifiers. At home, be sure to use the freshest eggs possible. Some stores sell pasteurized eggs for home use. You can also coddle the eggs in 170°F water and remove the hot yolks, which will have cooked slightly, from the whites. Homemade mayonnaise will only keep under refrigeration for three to four days. A lower-fat version can be made with silken tofu.

Commercial mayonnaise

Commercial mayonnaise sold in jars originated in New York City, in Manhattan's Upper West Side. In 1905, the first ready-made mayonnaise was sold at Richard Hellmann's delicatessen on Columbus Avenue, between 83rd and 84th Streets. In 1912, Mrs. Hellmann's mayonnaise was mass marketed and called Hellmann's Blue Ribbon Mayonnaise.

At about the same time that Hellmann's Mayonnaise was thriving on the East Coast of the United States, a California company, Best Foods, introduced their own mayonnaise, which turned out to be very popular in the western United States. Head-to-head competition between the two brands was averted when, in 1932, Best Foods bought out the Hellmann's brand. By then both mayonnaises had such commanding market shares in their own half of the country that it was decided that both brands be preserved. To this day, Best Foods Mayonnaise is only sold west of the Rocky Mountains, while Hellmann's is sold east of the Rockies.

In the Southeastern part of the United States, Mrs. Eugenia Duke of Greenville, South Carolina founded the Duke's Product Company in 1917 to sell sandwiches to soldiers training at nearby Fort Sevier. Her homemade mayonnaise became so popular that her company began to focus exclusively on producing and selling the mayonnaise, eventually selling out to the C.F. Sauer company in 1929. Duke's Mayonnaise, still made to the original recipe, remains a popular brand of mayonnaise in the Southeast, although it is not generally available in other markets. Of special note to diabetics, Duke's mayonnaise is the only major mayonnaise available in the United States which does not include sugar as an ingredient.

Japanese mayonnaise, typically made with rice vinegar, tastes somewhat different from mayonnaise made from distilled vinegar. Sold in squishy plastic squeeze bottles, it is complementary to sushi and Japanese cuisine. It is even used on pizza. Kewpie is one popular brand of Japanese mayonnaise, advertised with a Kewpie doll logo.

Origin of the name

Mayonnaise made its English-language debut in a cookbook of 1841, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Mayonnaise is generally said to have been created by the chef of Louis François Armand du Plessis, duc de Richelieu in 1756, to celebrate the Duke's victory over the British at the port of Mahon (the capital of Minorca in the Balearic Islands). The French spelling for this Spanish port is "Mahón", and thus "sauce from Mahon" is "sauce mahónnaise", from which it was said the word "mayonnaise" was derived. This often-repeated story seems flawed, however.

Antoine Carême speculated in 1833 that the name was derived from the French word manier, meaning "handle, feel, ply", thus possibly in this case "stir or blend". Carême appears to have been straining to come up with an etymology for sauce Mayonnaise. It is inconceivable that Carême – trained by the greatest pâtissier in Napoleonic Paris, creator of French haute cuisine, and chef d'hotel to the duc de Talleyrand – would not know the history of the name, had mayonnaise been created as recently as 1756. Indeed, Talleyrand himself grew up under the Ancien regime (he had already held a bishopric), was a fastidious connoisseur of the table and moved in much the same circles as the Richelieu family. The origin of "mayonnaise" must be much older than 1756, if it was obscure to Carême.

In fact it may appear more credible that sauce Mayonnaise was originally named for Charles of Lorraine, Duke of Mayenne (in northwest France), who presided over the meeting of the Estates General in January 1593 that had been summoned for the purpose of choosing a Catholic ruler for France. The sauce may have remained unnamed until after the Battle of Arques in 1589. It may then have been christened "Mayennaise" after Charles de Lorraine, duc de Mayenne, because he took the time to finish his meal of chicken with cold sauce before being defeated in battle by Henri IV.

Another proposed etymology points to the French city of Bayonne; "mayonnaise" would be a corruption of bayonnaise.

External links

Creative Cooking School website: offers several possible origins of sauce mayonnaise
Mayonnaise on MadeHow.com Describes the background, history, and the manufacturing process of mayonnaise