Who invented mayonnaise

Still, some people don't want to eat eggs, which is what Hampton Creek's Just Mayo is about, using yellow pea protein and food starch instead. It didn't invent eggless mayonnaise but has marketed it more aggressively than anyone else. Both Unilever and the American Egg Board have tried and failed to stop Hampton Creek's product from being labelled as mayonnaise.

I long found the name confusing since it's not "just mayo"; it's mayo without the eggs. Then I learned from a September Bloomberg BusinessWeek profile of the company that "it's 'Just' Mayo as in 'righteous,' not 'simply. The company's argument is that growing peas uses up fewer resources and is more humane than raising egg-laying chickens. Which is true, but wow, what an insufferably smug name for a simple condiment.

It also may be one reason Hampton Creek is struggling so much now. As far as mayonnaise is concerned, though, the big technological breakthrough came several centuries ago, and the great culinary disruption just over one century ago.

What's happening now is just, well, more mayo on the BLT. Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.

By Justin Fox Mon. 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 In , 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 known variously as allioli, alholi and aioli: "Allioli had been around at least since Pliny wrote about it in the first century C.

Ancient Egyptians and Romans enjoyed an olive oil and egg mixture that didn't quite meet today's definition of mayonnaise. In America, mayonnaise was initially considered a luxury, according to Slate. The fancy New York restaurant Delmonico's served chicken mayonnaise and lobster mayonnaise in Fast-forward to , when German immigrant Richard Hellman started selling wide-mouthed jars of mayonnaise at his New York deli via Southern Living.

His recipe included vinegar, salt, sugar, and other spices. But nature abhors a vacuum sous-vide aside , and plenty of theorists took advantage of mayonnaise's unclear origins to come up with their own.

Antoine Careme, the chef often credited with inventing haute cuisine, 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. If you look in the 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.

And even in the early s, there were theories floating around that the word was actually Bayonnaise , named after the French-Basque town of Bayonne, and that some mumbling and thick French accents had reduced that "b" down to the "m" of "mayonnaise. 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 "Manual for Hosts":.

Who needs history when you've got French pride! In , President Calvin Coolidge did for mayonnaise was Ronald Reagan did for jelly beans, when he claimed that his Aunt Mary's homemade mayonnaise was his favorite food.

It wasn't until that people could start buying mayonnaise in stores, making it even easier to keep in the pantry. That was when a German immigrant named Richard Hellmann began selling jars of mayonnaise made with raw egg yolks, vegetable oil, vinegar, and small amounts of salt, sugar and seasoning at the deli he owned in New York.

According to Andrew F. Smith, a mayonnaise historian of sorts , the jars he sold it in, bedecked with blue ribbons, that were large enough to accommodate a spoon, perfect for scooping mayonnaise into Waldorf salads. In May of Hellmann updated his packaging. He trademarked the brand name "Blue Ribbon Mayonnaise" and updated his packaging to include re-useable glass screw-top canning jars emblazoned with the Hellmann's Mayonnaise name.

By , business was so good that Hellmann was able to close his delicatessen and wholly devote himself to pushing mayonnaise.