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MAYONNAISE Crème de la crème
It was in a college canteen
where I first realised the extent to which mayonnaise had made it in India.
I had booked the college auditorium for an event and wanted the canteen to
supply samosas. But I could hardly get the manager’s attention for all the
hungry students calling orders, many of them for rolls (vegetarian only, in
this college). Two of the popular seemed to be Paneer Szechuan with Mayo
and Jain Cheese with Mayo – both eggless, of course, and slathered on like
savoury white glue for the spicy contents of the rolls.
This wasn’t the mayonnaise I remembered from when I
was growing up when it was still not a common condiment. My mother whipped
it up in her Kenwood blender as the imperative accompaniment to boiled eggs
in sandwiches, it was proffered at meals in the houses of Parsi friends to
get us kids to eat salad and the matchless chicken rolls sold in Sterling
Cinema oozed particularly glutinous yellow mayo. But it wasn’t found in
shops, unless a stray bottle of Hellman’s from the US landed there, so most
had to be made at home, and made with eggs.
Eggs are needed for mayonnaise because it is an
emulsion, a mixture of two liquids: oil (lots of it) and water, vinegar or
lime juice. Normally, these would never mix, but chemicals called
emulsifiers can bind the two to form a new kind of liquid, so creamy and
white, it looks like a dairy product. This is where its name comes from,
the Latin mulgere which means ‘to milk’, and the resemblance is not a
coincidence since milk itself is a natural emulsion, of milkfats, casein
and watery whey – which is what it splits into when, as with all emulsions,
the bonds are broken by something like acid.
Eggs are emulsions too, of fats and water held
together by particularly strong emulsifiers, which is why they are so good
at emulsifying other liquids. And this is probably where mayonnaise starts,
though its origins are very contested. It has been suggested it was the
favourite sauce of the Duke of Mayenne, or an Irish general called
MacMahon, or was created to celebrate the capture of Mahon, the capital of
the Mediterranean island of Minorca by the French from the British in 1756.
It does seem to have been invented around then, in the late 18th century,
making it a relatively recent addition to the foundational sauces of
Western cuisine.
A Mediterranean origin is also possible because
many sauces in that region are made by beating thick mixtures of olive oil
and eggs, like the Southern French aioli or Greek skordalia. The guess is
that at some point someone noticed that if oil was slowly mixed into the
egg, a sauce was created that managed to be both rich in taste, yet not
cloying, because of the lemon or vinegar that was also added, and light and
creamy in texture. It was a cold sauce, both in its making and eating, so
it didn’t need all the tricky timing of heat that sauces like hollandaise
need and it didn’t need to be kept warm. This made it ideal for dishes
served cold, like salads and cold meats.
Above all, mayonnaise tasted really good, which is
hardly surprising since it is basically oil made into an easily eatable
form and our brains are wired to love fats. Mayonnaise making spread fast,
especially at the expense of other ‘white sauces’ made by cooking milk or
stock with flour, and sometimes eggs. As food writer John Thorne writes,
“where few white sauces managed to rise much above library paste,
mayonnaise offered instant voluptuousness and piquancy.” It also became the
base for other cold sauces like remoulade, made by adding mustard and
herbs, or tartar, made with capers, onions and herbs.
The British in India found mayonnaise particularly
useful because the climate called for cold dishes. Milk supply was also
uncertain and cream particularly scarce since it was mostly used to make
ghee. But oil and eggs were easy to get, and so was the manual labour
needed to beat up a thick, smooth mayonnaise. “One of the most useful and
popular of all the sauces we attempt out here,” wrote Colonel
Kenney-Herbert in Culinary Jottings for Madras, giving detailed directions
on how to make it along with characteristically choleric comments on the
tendency to add too much vinegar. He wrote that a friend suggested that
making mayonnaise should be concluded with a prayer of thanks: “He is
right.”
White sauces fought back against the mayonnaise
conquest. Mayonnaise was painted as fattening and expensive because of all
the olive oil used (though any mild tasting oil will do), and also as really
hard to make, because of all the beating needed to make the emulsion, and
the fact that it is prone to split. Mayonnaise makers admittedly helped
here by making the procedure sound incredibly arcane, with little pinches
and pours to be added at precise points. In fact, as Elizabeth David points
out in the best essay on the subject, from her collection Is There a Nutmeg
in the House? it is actually really easy, quick and hard to get wrong once
you know the basics. Split mayonnaise, unlike split milk, can always be
rescued by adding another egg yolk, and tips like using a hard-boiled yolk
along with a raw one can help make particularly versions.
But white sauces then pulled off the ultimate trick
– they simply called themselves mayonnaise! In my edition of the Times
& Talents Cookbook, a famous volume produced by a Mumbai charity, there
are seven recipes for mayonnaise, but only two are the classic kind. Others
are made with cooked milk, condensed milk and even strained dahi.
Commercially bottled mayonnaise, first created in the USA, confused matters
further by involving some eggstabilized sauce but also additional chemical
stabilizers to increase shelf life. Mayonnaise became the focus of a lot of
food technology and moved increasingly far from the classic sauce.
This doesn’t necessarily mean bad. Some commercial
mayonnaises are tasty, even the eggless versions. It is also true that
eggless emulsions seem to have been around for a while. Harold McGee notes
that when Antonin Carême, one of the founders of the Western culinary
tradition, first published recipes for “magnonnaise” in 1828, of the three
he gave only one was emulsified with egg yolk, while the other two used
ingredients like meat extract cooked to jelly (so eggless mayonnaise can be
non-vegetarian!). There is also an interesting Portuguese recipe for an
emulsion based on very cold milk and oil.
If one sticks to the definition of mayonnaise as an
emulsion, then all these count (though it would exclude the purely
heat-thickened sauces like the delicious “Indian mayonnaise” in Mrs GL
Routleff ’s Economical Indian Cookery Book (1942) since that is simply a
sauce of coconut milk cooked with vinegar, onions and eggs). These
alternative emulsions have definitely increased the appeal of mayonnaise,
to people who don’t eat eggs or even those who do but are queasy at the
fact that the classic recipe is really made from raw ingredients. As those
college canteen mayo rolls showed, a creamy sauce to bind together and also
counter other spicy ingredients has real value.
Yet egg-emulsified mayonnaise is a wonderful thing,
quite distinct from the commercial stuff and, ironically, easier to make at
home since it does not need special chemicals. One good version is sold in
a quirky little store in Mumbai called Filter set up by Alok Nanda, who was
the creative spirit behind the Trikaya Grey ad agency in its heyday.
Nanda’s design agency has set up the store as an outlet for products it
finds interesting, and one of them is Ronnie’s Small Batch Mayonnaise.
This, the label says, is “made in the traditional Parsee way: using his
mother’s 1950’s Sunbeam mixer, fanatical attention to quality, and a recipe
that has been in the family since Victoria ascended the throne.”
The bottle has a tongue-in-cheek charm and the
mayonnaise itself is just like what my mother used to make. I would buy it
regularly if it wasn’t even easier to just make it myself, and not with a
blender, but by hand. All I need is an egg yolk, a bottle of decent oil,
salt, mustard powder, white wine vinegar and about 8-10 minutes of bicep
building mixing with a whisk or wooden spoon. It is almost magical to see
these simple ingredients change as you dribble in oil into what Mrs David
describes has the texture of an ointment – a thick, savoury, subtle mass
that can heal the most tired and jaded of tastebuds.
vikram.doctorCDET130614
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