mayonnaise

Mayonnaise — the emulsion of egg yolks, oil, and acid that is the foundation of countless sauces and salads — first appears in French culinary texts in the early 19th century, and its etymology has been debated ever since. The most widely told story links it to the Battle of Mahon: in 1756, the Duke of Richelieu captured the port of Mahón on the island of Minorca from the British. His chef, supposedly unable to find cream for a sauce and substituting olive oil whisked with egg yolks, named the result sauce mahonnaise in honor of the victory. This story is charming and precise, which ought to make one suspicious — precise folk etymologies are often later inventions.

The rival etymology is linguistically more convincing but less dramatic. The French word moyeu (later moyen) meant egg yolk in medieval and early modern French — derived from the Latin medius (middle), because the yolk is the center of the egg. A sauce made with moyeux — egg yolks — could plausibly have been called moyeunaise, moyennaise, or eventually mayonnaise. French culinary historian Prosper Montagné favored this etymology in the 1930s, and several serious etymologists have supported it since. The transformation from moyeunaise to mayonnaise follows normal French phonetic patterns. The Mahón story would require the sauce to have no name before 1756 and to appear suddenly in the written record thereafter — but the written record is sparse, which keeps both stories alive.

Regardless of etymology, mayonnaise as a named, standardized sauce is clearly a French culinary formalization. The technique — whisking oil into egg yolks to create a stable emulsion — was known earlier, but the word 'mayonnaise' in print is early 19th-century French. Carême, the great French chef of the early 1800s, described it, and it spread through European cuisine during the 19th century as French culinary style dominated the kitchens of aristocratic and bourgeois Europe. Its composition was codified: egg yolks, oil (originally olive, later neutral vegetable oil), mustard, and lemon juice or vinegar.

In the 20th century, mayonnaise became industrialized and global. Hellmann's (founded 1905 in New York, now owned by Unilever) and Best Foods are the dominant American brands; Kewpie mayonnaise, made with rice vinegar and slightly sweeter, is Japan's standard. The Japanese adoption of mayonnaise is one of the great food culture grafts of the 20th century: Japan became one of the world's largest mayonnaise markets, developing Kewpie in 1925 and subsequently creating an entirely distinct mayonnaise culture including the drizzling of Kewpie over takoyaki, okonomiyaki, and sushi rolls in ways that would puzzle both a French chef and a 1756 Minorcan innkeeper.