Mayonnaise (), colloquially referred to as "mayo" (), is a thick, creamy sauce with a rich and tangy taste that is commonly used on sandwiches, hamburgers, bound salads, and French fries. It also forms the base for other sauces, including tartar sauce, fry sauce, remoulade, salsa golf, ranch dressing, and rouille. Mayonnaise is an emulsion of oil, egg yolk, and an acid, either vinegar or lemon juice; there are many variants using additional flavorings. The color varies from near-white to pale yellow, and its texture from a light cream to a thick gel. Commercial eggless versions are available for those who avoid eggs.
History
Mayonnaise is a French cuisine appellation that seems to have appeared for the first time in 1806. The hypotheses invoked over time as to the origin(s) of mayonnaise have been numerous and contradictory. Most hypotheses do however agree on the geographic origin of the sauce: Mahón in Menorca, Spain during the occupation by French troops in the Seven Years' War. Other theories have been dismissed by some authors as being somewhat a retrospective invention aiming to credit the sauce as an invention of southwestern France, when, most likely, its origin can be found in the port city of Menorca. Mayonnaise sauce may have its origins in the ancient remoulade. Another hypothesis is that mayonnaise is derived from aioli. Finally, the process of emulsifying egg yolk was known for a long time to pharmacists, who used it to prepare ointments and salves. Some have pointed out that it would make sense that mayonnaise originated in Spain given its requirement of olive oil, a liquid produced and consumed mostly there at the time. This hypothesis is similar to another that places the origins of French fries in Spain using the same rationale. In 1750, Francesc Roger Gomila, a Valencian friar, published a recipe for a sauce similar to mayonnaise in Art de la Cuina ('Art of the Kitchen'). He calls the sauce aioli bo. If he does not describe precisely the recipe—suggesting that it was known by everyone on the island—the way it is used, the preparations for which it is used as a base and the dishes with which it is associated are most often inconceivable with an aioli. Earlier recipes of similar emulsified sauces, usually containing garlic, appear in a number of Spanish recipe books dating back to the 14th-century Llibre de Sent Soví, where it is called all-i-oli, literally 'garlic and oil' in Catalan. This sauce had clearly spread throughout the Crown of Aragon, for Juan de Altamiras gives a recipe for it in his celebrated 1745 recipe book Nuevo Arte de Cocinar ('New Art of Cooking').
On April 18, 1756, the Duke of Richelieu invaded Menorca and took the port of Mahon. A theory states that the aioli bo sauce was thereafter adopted by the cook of the Duke of Richelieu, who upon his return to France made the sauce famous in the French court. which would have been known as mahonnaise. A number of legends arose relating how the Duke of Richelieu first tried the sauce, including his discovery of the sauce in a local inn of Mahon where he would have allegedly asked the innkeeper to make him some dinner during the siege of Mahon, and even that he invented it himself as a quick garnish. Another version is Grimod de La Reynière's 1808 bayonnaise sauce which is a sort of aspic: "But if one wants to make from this cold chicken, a dish of distinction, one composes a bayonnaise, whose green jelly, of a good consistency, forms the most worthy ornament of poultry and fish salads." In 1806, André Viard, in Le Cuisinier Impérial, transformed this recipe for remoulade by replacing the roux with egg yolk. In another recipe, an Indian remoulade, without mustard, he specifies that the binding is facilitated by incorporating the oil little by little. This is the first modern mention of a stable cold emulsified sauce. It is only in 1815 that Antonin Carême mentions a cold "magnonaise" emulsified with egg yolk. The word "mayonnaise" is attested in English in 1815. Auguste Escoffier wrote that mayonnaise was a French mother sauce of cold sauces.
Etymology A common theory is that it is named for Mahón (Maó in Catalan), itself named after its founder Mago Barca, in Menorca, in honor of the 3rd Duke of Richelieu's victory over the British in 1756, and in fact the name mahonnaise is used by some authors. But the name is only attested several decades after that event. One version of this theory says that it was originally known as salsa mahonesa in Spanish, but that spelling too is only attested later. Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de La Reynière, a lawyer by qualification who acquired fame during the reign of Napoleon for his sensual and public gastronomic lifestyle, rejected the name mayonnaise because the word "is not French". He also rejected the name mahonnaise because Mahón "is not known for good food", and thus he preferred bayonnaise, after the city of Bayonne, which "has many innovative gourmands and... produces the best hams in Europe." Indeed, the city of Bayonne (sauce à la Bayonnaise) could also have given its name to this type of sauce, by spelling deformation. This form would seem to be confirmed by the fact that there is no written record of the sauce à la mayonnaise before the beginning of the 19th century, long after the capture of the city of Mahón. Another hypothesis is based, according to Marie-Antoine Carême, a famous contemporary French chef, on a derivative of magnonaise (from the verb magner, or manier) or, according to Prosper Montagné, of moyeunaise (or moyennaise), based on moyeu(x) (or moyen) which means 'egg yolk', in Old French. It has also been suggested that the word be linked to the old verb mailler, meaning 'to beat'. Joseph Favre, for his part, states in his memoirs that mayonnaise is an alteration of the word magnonnaise, derived from Magnon (Lot-et-Garonne), and that a cook from Magnon would have popularized it first in the South of France; he notes that this sauce has been variously named mahonnaise, bayonnaise and mayonnaise.
Preparation Recipes for mayonnaise date to the early nineteenth century. In 1815, Louis Eustache Ude wrote:
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