Like almost all worthwhile foodstuffs, mayonnaise was not discovered, it was invented. The who and when of mayonnaise’s invention has been the subject of much bitter, charged debate (see my essay The New Culture War: Mayonnaise and the Competing Discourses of Condiment Hegemony for more).
The earliest, most widely accepted invention story is that mayonnaise was created during the Civil War as a last-ditch effort by southern generals to boost moral and humiliate the Union which was at the time experiencing great anxiety over the presumed inferiority of their sandwiches. In one story, the original intent of mayonnaise was to cure dysentery, but this is largely revisionist history, intended to belittle the importance of condiment research in the late 19th century.
Professor Rocklin of UMass in 1973 offered a controversial new idea suggesting mayonnaise was not actually invented until sometime around the stock market crash of 1929, when Herbert Hoover dedicated himself to making the best bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich ever created. Per Dr.Rocklin, previous spreads passing themselves off as mayonnaise were in fact nothing more than white, odorless pastes designed to keep sandwiches from falling apart when eaten on the move.
Even more controversial, is the work by Borris Straznofsky of the Ukraine in the late 1980s, providing convincing evidence that it was the early Mayans who invented mayonnaise, as well as Sweet & Low, breakfast in bed, and the practice amongst certain southerners to call all forms of carbonated sweet drinks “Coke.”
Beyond its invention, mayonnaise has featured prominently in some of the most famous brunches every accomplished, including those in 1962, 1989, and 2002.
In certain cultures, mayonnaise is thought to be lucky and is often spread liberally throughout the house to ward of bad spirits, while in other cultures it is superstitiously believed that eating jars of mayonnaise before bed will help bring about type 2 diabetes.
While many people believe the color mayonnaise is either “white” or “off-white,” in fact this is not correct. The official color of mayonnaise is, and has been for at least the last decade, “mayonnaise color” which is, incidentally, the 42nd most popular color for painting a bathroom.
There is a dark side to mayonnaise, one I will explore more completely in my upcoming essay (due out in June), “The Mayonnaise Wars: How the Mayonnaise trade Ended the British, Roman, and Hungarian Empires.”
Tags: tongue in cheek, what is funny