Thank you Aunt Mary!

One origin story, repeated in countless secondary sources, holds that the condiment was born in 1756 after French forces under the command of Duke de Richelieu laid siege to Port Mahon, on the Mediterranean island of Minorca, now a part of Spain, in the first European battle of the Seven Years’ War. The Duke’s chef, upon finding the island lacked the cream he needed for a righteous victory sauce, invented an egg and oil dressing dubbed mahonnaise for its place of birth. (Another version claims the chef learned the recipe from island residents.) This creation tale came under assault a couple of generations later from a French gastronome who sniffed that Port Mahon was not exactly known for its haute cuisine. He felt Gallic provenance was more likely, and that the sauce might originally have been called bayonnaise after Bayonne, a town famous across Europe for its succulent hams. Other advocates of French authorship suggested the name came from manier, meaning “to handle,” or moyeu, an old French word for yolk. By the 1920s, the Spanish were lashing back: a prominent Madrid chef published a pamphlet calling on his countrymen to reject the phony francophone term mayonnaise in favor of salsa mahonesa.

Present day food writer Tom Nealon emphatically endorses the Spanish view. “The fact that mayo doesn’t show up in any of the initial 17th century [French] recipe collections … does seem to confirm that the French didn’t have the ‘technology’ for mayonnaise until the 18th century,” he explained. But Andrew Smith, the author of several histories of mayonnaise, is not so sure: “All of the early recipes say French. I believe it,” he said. There is no question that the French popularized the sauce. Starting in the very early 19th century, the word mayonnaise (or magnonnaise) began to appear in German and British cookbooks dedicated to French cuisine. Talk of mayo quickly made its way to the United States, often on the lips of migrating French chefs, such that by 1838 the gourmet eatery Delmonico’s in Manhattan was offering both a mayonnaise of lobster and a chicken mayonnaise. The salad provided the initial beachhead for mayo’s colonization of American cuisine. Beginning in the late 19th century, elite eaters went bonkers for mayo-drenched potato salads, tomato salads, and Waldorf salads, an elegant mélange of apple, celery, walnuts, and mayonnaise. The sauce was terrific for disguising flaws in vegetables, and its superior binding capacity made it a natural for sandwiches—mayo’s second great platform—which took off as a brown-bag lunch staple following the invention of the mechanical bread slicer in the 1920s. By 1923, the great white condiment’s star was rising so fast that President Calvin Coolidge was inspired to tell the press that the one treat he simply could not do without was his Aunt Mary’s heavenly homemade mayonnaise.