An Introduction to Mayonnaise:
Mayonnaise is a wondrous invention of Culinary history. It consists of eggs, vegetable oil, and an acidic liquid, usually vinegar or lemon juice, but in its finished form
is nothing like any of those three.
This is true of lots of cooked foods, of course, but mayonnaise
isn't heated, just mixed. (Although eggs used in commercial mayonnaise are
pasteurized (heated), to ward off salmonella.) In its mass-produced form,
it is a durable source of creamy goodness compiled of a gratifyingly shortlist
(for a mass-produced food) of reasonably wholesome ingredients. It must have been a great technological breakthrough in its
day.
And surely it was. The standard creation story, as told on
the website of mayonnaise market leader Hellman's, is this:
"Mayonnaise is said to be the invention of the French chef of
the Duke de Richelieu in 1756. While the duke was defeating the British at Port
Mahon, his chef was creating a victory feast that included a sauce made of
cream and eggs. When the chef realized that there was no cream in the kitchen,
he improvised, substituting olive oil for the cream. A new culinary masterpiece
was born, and the chef named it 'Mahonnaise' in honor of the Duke's
victory."
Mahon is on the now-Spanish Mediterranean island of Menorca. In
2010, food writer Tom Nealon dismissed this account as "ludicrous"
and hypothesized that "salsa mahonesa" had evolved much earlier out
of the ancient Mediterranean combination of garlic and olive oil is known variously as allioli, alholi, and aioli:
"Allioli had been around in the first century C.E., but it had always been extremely problematic -
coaxing an emulsion out of oil, garlic, and salt is, it is almost universally
agreed, nearly impossible. This process had remained a Catalan secret for
millennia for just this reason - it could hide in plain sight because it was
the culinary equivalent of black magic. What had apparently happened at some
point (probably during the Renaissance) was that someone had added an egg and
an acid to the recipe. This changed everything - anyone with the simple, if
unlikely, instructions could now make this wonderful sauce."
While this blistering debate over the merits of mayonnaise reached
its boiling point only in recent decades, controversy has haunted the egg-based
sauce from the very beginning. However, originally the disagreement was not
about whether the condiment was good or bad, but rather who could claim
bragging rights—France or Spain.
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 the 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
centuries [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.
I've given here the introduction of one of the main ingredients of Mayo Garlic Sauce, which has now become a worldwide necessity of nearly every fast food, especially for those who are in the market commercially. Preparing your own sauce will give you great satisfaction and I am sure that you'll feel that the homemade Sauce is more healthy and nutritious than the store bought one.
The problem lies with our sedentary style of living, and the availability of everything over the counter, we just drive out to the store and fill our shopping trolley, not knowing how good these commercial products will prove for our elders and kids. Anyway, I must admit here that the Mayonnaise itself is not good for health and its use must be minimized.
So, here we are, let us start preparing Mayo Garlic Sauce with the name of ALLAH.
