Mayonnaise

History and Origins

In 1756, the French navy launched an assault on Minorca, a little Mediterranean island with a huge natural harbor, the Port of Mahon. One version of the story has it 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.

In another version, the sauce was invented by the Spanish and co-opted by the French. Salsa mahonesa was a native invention of the Catalan-speaking residents of Minorca and predates the French mayonnaise. One problem with these theories is that there’s a 50-year gap between the battle for Port Mahon and mayonnaise’s appearance in the textual record.

Antoine Careme, liked to call his mayonnaise “magnonnaise,” claiming that the word was derived from the French verb manier, which meant “to stir,” thanks to the continuous stirring necessary to make a good batch.

According to Larousse Gastronomique, you’ll read that “mayonnaise” might be a corruption of moyeunaise, a theoretical missing link derived from the Old French moyeu, meaning “egg yolk.”

Other theories claim that the word mayonnaise comes from the word bayonnaise, named after the French-Basque town of Bayonne.

It might be impossible to pick out the real history of mayonnaise from the many contenders, but I like the typically French approach that one cookbook author, Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de la Reyniere, took to the problem in his 1808

The actual origin of mayonnaise is likely from aioli, the sauce made with just garlic, oil, and salt, blended together in a mortar and pestle. The name means, literally, “garlic” (alh in Provencal) and “oil” (oli in the same), and has been made in southwestern France and northeastern Spain dating back, at least, to the time of Roman occupation. Mayonnaise adds egg and a little bit of vinegar to that mix, which makes for a more consistent sauce that won’t separate out into its constituent parts.