Heavy on the Mayo

As a schoolboy it wasn’t uncommon to return from school hungry and make myself a mayonnaise sandwich, two pieces of Sunbeam white bread slathered with mayonnaise washed down with a glass of milk. These days mayonnaise isn’t a regular ingredient on my plate, but along with mustard, I do keep a bottle in the refrigerator for those times when a visiting friend wants it on a sandwich, or a recipe calls for it. Despite my own take it or leave it attitude, and the so-called war against obesity, America is a country where good and bad cholesterol numbers are tossed about with the same frequency as Kim Kardashian’s problems, and where mayonnaise defies any trend toward healthy eating. As someone said, it’s the glue of salads and celebrations. Whether it’s full strength mayo, fat-free, low-fat, soy-based, organic, trans-fat-free or flavored, supermarkets are stacked with mayonnaise choices, and shoppers are emptying the shelves.

Mayonnaise began its spread around the world in the town of Mahón on the small island of Minorca off the coast of Spain. In its earliest form it was a simple condiment made of raw egg yolk and olive oil which the natives of Mahón called salsa mahonesa in Spanish and maonesa in Catalan. While expelling the British from Minorca in 1756 the French general Armand de Vignerot du Plessis sampled the salsa mahonesa of Mahón and liking it, took the recipe back to France.

French chefs adopted this sauce of Mahón as a high quality condiment and renamed it mahonnaise. By 1823 it was in use in England and had also spread to America where it was viewed as a French sauce difficult to prepare. The invention of an electric mixer solved much of that problem, and it was also made more popular by the spread of inexpensive bottled dressings. Richard Hellman was a German-born delicatessen owner in Manhattan who realized that there was a market for what had by then become mayonnaise. His wife’s recipe for ready-made mayonnaise was already a popular condiment in the deli, even sold in scoops for take out. This popularity led to Hellman selling it in bulk to other stores. He built a factory in 1912 and began producing and selling Hellman’s Blue Ribbon Mayonnaise in one-pound wooden “boats.” A year later he began packaging his mayonnaise in large glass jars. An increase in the popularity of cole slaw as a side dish is closely connected to Hellman’s Mayonnaise. The business was so successful that in 1917 he closed his delicatessen to devote himself full time to the mayonnaise business.

Known as Best Foods west of the Rocky Mountains, Hellman’s is the leading US mayonnaise brand with over fifty percent of the market share. As of September 2010, Hellmann’s accounted for 31.8 percent of the nearly $1.3 billion US mayonnaise market, with total sales of $401,204,800.

Oleg Zhornitskiy is a man who loves his mayonnaise and currently holds the world record for competitive mayonnaise eating—four 32 ounce bowls in eight minutes.

The postcard above is one from 1932 advertising Japanese Kewpie Mayonnaise.

Pancakes and Ketchup

During the years of growing up and on into early adulthood, wherever meals were served, in diners, cafeterias, restaurants and even the ones regarded as fine restaurants there was always along with the salt and pepper one condiment that had a permanent place on the table, and that was ketchup. No doubt that’s the reason I now like ketchup on a number of different foods. In a steak restaurant with friends once I surprised everyone at the table by eating the expensive prime cut of steak with ketchup. But then, people in Japan surprised me by putting ketchup on their eggs. In a word, people everywhere like ketchup and that has been the case for centuries.

As far back as the first century AD Romans were using a condiment to flavor their fish and fowl and very likely it was an idea they got from the Greeks. The Romans used something they called liquamen made of vinegar, oil, pepper and a paste of anchovies. In 1690 the Chinese developed a tangy sauce, a brine of pickled fish, shellfish and spices which they called ke-tsiap and which later spread to Malaysia where it was called kechap. British seamen brought the puree-sauce back to England. Chefs there tried duplicating it, but didn’t have the necessary ingredients so substituted things like mushrooms, walnuts and cucumbers. They also had trouble with the foreign spelling so dubbed their condiment “ketchup.”

So, where did the tomatoes come from? That happened in New England near the end of the eighteenth-century, and though tomato ketchup was slow to catch on, by the mid 1800s it had become a kitchen staple. Naturally, it was all homemade ketchup in those days, and the process was time consuming with all the parboiling, peeling, removing seeds and continuous stirring. In 1876 a German-American businessman named Henry Heinz began factory production of Heinz Tomato Ketchup and women eagerly bought it. It was an instant success in its wide-base, thin-neck, cork-sealed bottle, and apart from the cork seal is a design still in use today.

Ketchup is the most frequently used condiment in the US, with children under thirteen consuming fifty percent more than people in other age brackets. Over 650 million bottles of Heinz Ketchup are sold each year in more than 140 countries. The company uses in excess of two million tons of tomatoes each year, though some of that is used in other Heinz products. As for what people like with ketchup, is it only hamburgers, hot dogs and scrambled eggs?

Richard Nixon liked ketchup on cottage cheese. Some pour it over their pancakes. As a kid I sometimes ate mayonnaise sandwiches, but ketchup sandwiches? Also heard of mashed potatoes and ketchup, and people who insist that French toast is better with ketchup than syrup. A grilled cheese sandwich with ketchup doesn’t sound too bad, but splashed over macaroni and cheese, or tuna? How about those times you’re in a hurry, or maybe the cupboard is sort of bare…poor man’s spaghetti marinara in a jiffy—just douse the cooked spaghetti with ketchup.