By fucking
with me in front of our entire staff, by calling public attention to the stark,
even profound, differences in our origins and antecedents (his being dodging
bullets and crack dealers; mine being a white farm boy’s pedigree from rural
Missouri), Chef H. was expressing admiration for the way our two respective
houses, front and back, were working together, and just how beautifully we, he
and I—despite our obvious differences—could rock over 600 entrees in just under
thirteen blazing, white-hot minutes of pure culinary rush. We were, the question had decided,
brothers in arms.
But just because Chef H.’s question had been fair, just
because it had been a sublimated way to express happiness for the way we were
dominating the culinary challenges laid before us, didn’t mean that he wasn’t
fucking with me. Fucking with me
he most assuredly was (in the I’m-hugging-you-while-hitting-you way friends
will take the piss out of one another), and in front of nearly one hundred
cooks and waiters. A comeback was
required of me. A retort. A rejoinder. A verbal parry to his thrust. So answer this very pubic white glove across
my cheek I must. My first impulse
was, I confess, to defend my love of all things Elvis. The adoration I hold in my leaky little
pump of a heart for Elvis Aron Presley, in all his incarnations, from skinny
Hillbilly Cat to Elvis the Fat, transcendent and inglorious alike, is legendary
among my friends (I wear the same obscure, Mississippi-made pomade in my hair,
for instance, and lavish my own walls with deeply-non-ironic Elvis-on-Velvet
portraiture) and my Elvis man-crush has long made me an object of ridicule and
source for speculation for what is clearly (to the Freudians in my peer group)
a form of homo-erotic hero worship.
But the prospect of decrying (or defending) the latter-day virtues of a
bloated, jump-suit-wearing, pill-popping, Cadillac-driving piece of Tupelo
white trash seemed, in that moment, somehow less important than
defending the reputation of the single ingredient I consider central to the still-vital,
still-unique gastronomic identity of the American South, and the one ingredient
most important, in my opinion, to the continued evolution of everyday American
cooking.
It’s mayonnaise, yo, and it’s as important to American home
eating as Elvis is to American popular culture and music. It’s the love in your sandwich; it’s
the ice in your drink, and just like Elvis, it’s everywhere, man. Its
staggering ubiquity, its near omnipresence, renders it nearly invisible to most
American eaters. People simply
aren’t aware when they’re eating it, unless the dose be too heavy. There remain, today, but three really
good mid-scale, widely distributed (kinda, sorta) purveyors across the American
South who are making the stuff far, far better than any of their Yankee
brethren are up North.
I know what you’re thinking. Mayonnaise is the foodstuff mouth-breathers. Gastronomic knuckle-draggers. Culinary close-talkers. American eaters whose hillbilly palates
could not detect any difference between, say, a really good sabayon and the white
stuff they pipe into a Suzy-Q if the life of their riding lawnmowers depended
upon it. But nothing could be more
heterodox to the truth. To have
food historians tell it, mayonnaise comes from Spain—not from the trailer parks
of Mississippi or Missouri, thank you very much—from the town of Mahon on the
island of Menorca in the neighborhood of 1756, mas o menos. The
Spanish called it mahonesa, but our
name for the stuff is derived (or so it’s thought) from moyeu, the Old French word for egg yolk. Whatever its etymology, wherever it’s place of birth, I
call mayonnaise the defining American food ingredient that has elevated (with
the discovery of Vitamin D in the early-1920s and advent of large-scale poultry
farming, but that’s another story), the protein, starch, and vegetable sources of
work-a-day people of the American Southeast from their base ingredient status
to that exalted heights of being deviled,
and of matriculating to the supreme status of being called a sa-a-lad (in the three-syllable manner
of a Charleston church lady).
Mayonnaise is what cooks call an emulsion. In technical terms, it forms when one
ingredient with a “monolithic” molecular arrangement (that’s Harold McGee’s
term, yo) is shattered by beating another incompatible ingredient into it that
contains a fat compound (think oil and water). The molecular composition of this emulsifier lowers the
surface tension and allows droplets to form a creamy emulsion (again, on a
molecular level, so if you beat a teaspoon of oil into mayonnaise, you’ll
create roughly 30 billion droplets, ibid). Mayonnaise is simply an emulsion of these oil droplets
suspended in an amalgam of egg yolk, lemon juice, and water. As an emulsion, it’s packed with oil
droplets; nearly 80% of its volume is oil (ibid). At its inception, mayonnaise was made
in tiny batches inside home kitchens as a flavor agent and fat source for the
culinary elite. But the early part
of the 20th century saw mayonnaise being mass-produced for the
po-boys and egg salad sandwiches of the average Crescent City laborer. Mayonnaise added fat, depth of flavor,
and, well, moisture to the hitherto
arid interiors of the southern lunch pail. And suddenly it was everywhere across the South. Hero of the potluck. Rock star of the church social. Mayonnaise was put on everything, in
everything, and just like that, the tyranny of the dry sandwich was over. Southern cuisine was forever
changed. Miraculously, a few of those
early producers are still with us—three by my count—and their contributions to
southern culture (well beyond just the gastronomic realm, I say) remain as
revolutionary to the everyday eating of southerners as does the musical
insurgency launched from 706 Union Street by that swivel-hipped kid with the long
sideburns and predilection for gold lame.
I know you can make a better mayonnaise at home. I do. I also know you can make a better cupcake than what Tasty
Cake sells. And I know you can
source better fruit than what’s contained inside a can of Libby’s Fruit
Cocktail. But sometimes better is not the point. Sometimes better means accepting a product or ingredient on its own terms—why
it exists, from whence, and for whom.
I am convinced, in my heart of hearts, that a simple jar of mayonnaise
represented—to generations of southern cooks—a harbinger that life was getting
better, even easier, insofar as their emulsified fat now came premade in a
glass jar, and that to apply the contents of that jar to a mound of chopped
protein or slice of day-old-bread, was to improve that ingredient,
exponentially, with a single, simple pass of the butter knife.
