[What do AI and President Trump have in common?… neither can spell “mayonnaise.” Mayonnaise has always been a controversial condiment. It’s always been associated with white bread, white people, and the American Way. It doesn’t taste very good on bananas. Where do you stand on mayo? SB SM]
The inexorable rise of identity condiments has led to hard times for the most American of foodstuffs. And that’s a shame.
By Sandy Hingston·
8/11/2018
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Photograph by Clint Blowers
I write this in the dead of summer, always a bittersweet season — why is it we got summers off from school for all those years but don’t get summers off from work? — but doubly depressing these days, when I find myself suffering from picnic panic. The hot, languid weather brings with it a series of outdoor family events for which, as a tribal elder, I’m charged with providing provisions. Lately, though, I’ve had my feet cut out from under me. For years — nay, decades — my contributions to the Hingston clan’s Memorial Day and Fourth of July and Labor Day gatherings were no-brainers: I made what my mother once made. She was such a good cook that when she died prematurely, my husband and I typed up and photocopied (quaint, I know) a booklet of her recipes, tried-and-true favorites on which she built her formidable culinary reputation. When the holidays rolled around, I simply re-created one of her delicious dishes and toted it along.
Along about a decade ago, though, I began to notice I was toting home as much of my offerings as I’d concocted. My contributions were being overlooked — or shunned. Why should this be? Mom’s extraordinary potato salad — fragrant with dill, spiced by celery seed — went untouched on the picnic table. So did her macaroni salad, and her chicken salad, and her deviled eggs. … When I carted home a good three pounds of painstakingly prepared Waldorf salad — all that peeling and coring and slicing! — I was forced to face facts: The family’s tastes had changed. Or, rather, our family had changed. Oldsters were dying off, and the young ’uns taking our places in the paper-plate line were different somehow.
I racked my brain for the source of this generational disconnect. And then, one holiday weekend, while surveying the condiments set out at a family burger bash, I found it. On offer were four different kinds of mustard, three ketchups (one made from, I kid you not, bananas), seven sorts of salsa, kimchi, wasabi, relishes of every ilk and hue …
What was missing, though, was the common foundation of all Mom’s picnic foods: mayonnaise. While I wasn’t watching, mayo’s day had come and gone. It’s too basic for contemporary tastes — pale and insipid and not nearly exotic enough for our era of globalization. Good ol’ mayo has become the Taylor Swift of condiments.
My mom was the daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, born in the era in which huddled masses clambered ashore at Ellis Island, their pockets stuffed with kielbasa and chorizo and braunschweiger and makanek and lap cheong, and were processed in the great American assimilation grinder, emerging to dine happily ever after on Hatfield hot dogs and potato salad. Her entire life, she worried about sticking out, about not fitting in. She was self-conscious that her parents spoke with accents; she worked like a tiger to haul herself out of South Philly via Girls’ High and Temple, where she met my dad, whose American heritage stretched a few decades further back and whose people came from the British Isles, the omphalos of bland food.
America in the 1950s was full of strivers like Mom, desperate to forget family legacies of latkes and boxties and bramboráky, poring through the pages of Family Circle and Good Housekeeping and Woman’s Day for stars-and-stripes recipes that repped their newfound land. They wanted all their strangeness to dissolve into the sizzling pot of Crisco that crisped their french (not French) fries. Granted, it’s profoundly unfortunate, in esculent terms, that the nation’s newcomers fixated on foods from England and Ireland and Scotland. But women’s magazines back then were almost exclusively edited by Wasps.
Besides, the impetus seemed righteous. In a world torn asunder by the Great Depression, the Holocaust, and two World Wars, our citizenry needed to come together, be united, rally behind a collective vision of what it meant to be an American: You lived in a single-family house, you drove a station wagon, you wore bowling shirts and blue jeans, and you slathered mayonnaise on everything from BLTs to burgers to pastrami on rye. How do you think “Hold the mayo” became a saying? There was always mayo, and if you were some kind of deviant who didn’t want it, you had to say so out loud.
My son Jake, who’s 25, eats mayo. He’s a practical young man who works in computers and adores macaroni salad. He’s a good son. I also have a daughter. She was a women’s and gender studies major in college. Naturally, she loathes mayonnaise. And she’s not alone. Ask the young people you know their opinion of mayo, and you’ll be shocked by the depths of their emotion. Oh, there’s the occasional outlier, like Jake. But for the most part, today’s youth would sooner get their news from an actual paper newspaper than ingest mayonnaise.
The origins of this contentious condiment are hotly debated. Is its name derived from the city of Mahon on the Balearic Island of Menorca, where the Duc de Richelieu’s chef, unable to find cream for a sauce to celebrate his lordship’s successful siege during the Seven Years’ War, substituted an emulsion of eggs and oil? Or is it a bastardization of “Bayonnaise,” from the Gallic town renowned for its tasty hams? Whatever; either way, the dressing had crossed the Atlantic by 1838, when chichi Manhattan restaurant Delmonico’s offered both lobster and chicken “mayonnaise” on its menu. Mayo spread (hah) to the more common man after the invention of the mechanical bread slicer, just in time for sandwiches to be tucked inside brown bags and unwrapped in the lunchrooms of the nation’s factories. Mayonnaise at this point was still mostly handmade, whisked up by wives as needed. But the culinary horizon was shifting.
In 1912, the German-immigrant owner of an Upper West Side deli, Richard Hellmann, began to sell mayonnaise packed in jars decorated with three blue ribbons, according to culinary historian Andrew Smith. These jars differed from those of Hellmann’s condiment competitors in one vital way: They had wide mouths, enabling customers to get big-ass spoons inside. Sales were so successful that two years later, Hellmann sold his deli to open the first in an ever-growing series of manufacturing facilities devoted to Hellmann’s Blue Ribbon Mayonnaise.
At one point, when Hellmann and his wife were in Europe to research product distribution, travel agents urged them to sail back to the U.S. on a shiny new ship, the Titanic, that was making its maiden voyage. They took a smaller ship instead. And thank God, because Hellmann’s was the only mayonnaise my mayo-doting dad ever ate. More than a hundred years after its creation, Hellmann’s still sells more than half the mayonnaise in the nation. It is, Ari LeVaux wrote in Slate a few years back, “the standard by which all others are judged.” LeVaux interviewed a professional taster who, he says, considers Hellmann’s “a member of an exclusive group of products that are so refined and sophisticated that it’s hard for the average palate to break them down into their component flavors.” You don’t taste egg in Hellmann’s, the taster explained. You don’t taste oil, or vinegar: “All the flavors blend together. They’re balanced. Nothing sticks out. Everything is appropriate.”
Nothing sticks out. Mayonnaise isn’t bland; it’s artfully blended. It’s an evocation of the era I grew up in, of the homogeneity of that old, dead American dream.