Mayonnaise Sauce

History

Mayonnaise is a cold emulsion of egg yolk and oil whose origin the record has never settled. The most repeated tale credits the Duc de Richelieu's cook, who after the French capture of Port Mahón on Menorca in 1756 supposedly named a makeshift oil-and-egg sauce mahonnaise for the town. Etymologists treat this cautiously: the word surfaces in French only around 1804 to 1806 — in Kotzebue's Paris memoir ("mayonnaise de poulet") and Viard's Le cuisinier impérial — and it appears first as mayonnaise, not the expected mahonnaise. Rival derivations abound and none has prevailed: from moyeu, an old word for egg yolk; from manier, "to handle," which Carême championed as magnonnaise in 1815; from Bayonne (bayonnaise), a form Grimod de La Reynière preferred; and even from the Duke of Mayenne. Spanish writers counter that the sauce is theirs, a salsa mahonesa descended from the Catalan garlic-and-oil all-i-oli recorded as far back as the fourteenth-century Llibre de Sent Soví, and food historians still divide between French and Spanish paternity. Artusi, writing in 1891, enters none of this. He simply calls maionese one of the best sauces, especially for poached fish, and dwells on the patience it demands: yolks and olive oil worked almost drop by drop for more than twenty minutes into a thick cream, then finished with lemon, salt and white pepper.

Ingredients

• raw egg yolks
• tbsp olive oil
• lemon juice
• salt and white pepper
• hard-boiled egg yolk

Instructions

1. Beat two fresh raw egg yolks in a bowl.
2. Add olive oil very slowly, nearly drop by drop at first, working constantly, until you have used six or seven tablespoons or more.
3. Work in the juice of one lemon; continue beating over 20 minutes until it looks like a thick cream.
4. Season well with salt and white pepper. Optionally add one hard-boiled yolk to the raw ones for reliability.