Mayonnaise who invented

So, since we've already run through the linguistic history of every major American sandwich , this week takes us to the opaque origins of mayonnaise, a condiment as historically complicated as it is delicious. First, we have to go back to the Seven Years War wasn't kidding about the complicated. In , the French navy launched an assault on Minorca, a little Mediterranean island with a huge natural harbor, the Port of Mahon.

With overwhelming force and a little bit of British incompetence, the French took Mahon and more importantly took mayonnaise. Here, the story splits. Some reports say that the personal chef of the French admiral who had led the assault invented mayonnaise to celebrate the victory, and named it after the captured city: mahon-aise.

But some, like the food antiquarian and bookstore proprietor Tom Nealon , claim that Salsa Mahonesa, a native invention of the Catalan-speaking residents of Minorca, predates the Frenchified mayonnaise, and that the whole point of the French assault on the British was less about naval strategy and more about stealing the sauce for themselves.

This might be giving a little too much weight to the French love of food, but the theory that mayonnaise is a native Spanish sauce, and only co-opted by the French, is one of the more plausible out there. What has enabled this near-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. Still, some people don't want to eat eggs, which is what Hampton Creek's Just Mayo is about, using yellow pea protein and food starch instead. It didn't invent eggless mayonnaise but has marketed it more aggressively than anyone else.

Both Unilever and the American Egg Board have tried and failed to stop Hampton Creek's product from being labelled as mayonnaise. I long found the name confusing since it's not "just mayo"; it's mayo without the eggs. Then I learned from a September Bloomberg BusinessWeek profile of the company that "it's 'Just' Mayo as in 'righteous,' not 'simply. The company's argument is that growing peas uses up fewer resources and is more humane than raising egg-laying chickens.

Which is true, but wow, what an insufferably smug name for a simple condiment. It also may be one reason Hampton Creek is struggling so much now. As far as mayonnaise is concerned, though, the big technological breakthrough came several centuries ago, and the great culinary disruption just over one century ago.

What's happening now is just, well, more mayo on the BLT. Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www. By Justin Fox Mon. The standard creation story, as told on the website of mayonnaise market leader Hellman's, is this: "Mayonnaise is said to be the invention of the French chef of the Duke de Richelieu in In , food writer Tom Nealon dismissed this account as "ludicrous" and hypothesized that "salsa mahonesa" had evolved much earlier out of the ancient Mediterranean combination of garlic and olive oil known variously as allioli, alholi and aioli: "Allioli had been around at least since Pliny wrote about it in the first century C.

Report an error. Journalistic Standards. Ultimately, the mayonnaise made it into jars. At that time, two variations of the recipe were sold. To distinguish between them, Hellmann put a blue ribbon around one version.

In the almost century since, the label has undergone many evolutions, but a small blue ribbon, more modern than the original, still appears—moved down a bit. In , there was a meeting of the mayos, as Richard Hellmann, Inc. Continue To Page 2: Egg Salad. All rights reserved. All images are copyrighted to their respective owners. Get all new posts by email: Go. Minorca, the birthplace of mayonnaise, is the easternmost of the three Balearic Islands, now part of Spain.

Map courtesy Wikimedia.