Is mayonnaise French, or did it start on a Spanish island?
The French have claimed mayonnaise since the Napoleonic era, but most theories point to Mahón, a harbour town on Menorca captured by the Duke of Richelieu in 1756. A Valencian friar had already printed a similar egg-and-oil sauce there six years earlier, calling it aioli bo.
At heart the sauce is simple: oil beaten into egg yolk with vinegar or lemon juice until it forms a stable emulsion, pale white to yellow and anywhere from pourable to jelly-thick. Pharmacists had long used egg yolk to bind ointments, and Spanish cookbooks going back to the 14th-century Llibre de Sent Soví describe emulsified garlic sauces called all-i-oli, Catalan for garlic and oil. Some writers add that olive oil, needed for the original, was chiefly a Spanish product at the time.
In 1750 the friar Francesc Roger Gomila published a recipe book, Art de la Cuina, mentioning aioli bo without precise instructions, as if every islander already knew it. The dishes he paired it with make little sense for a garlicky aioli and fit a mayonnaise better. The popular story continues with Richelieu seizing Mahón on April 18, 1756, and his cook carrying the sauce back to the French court. Colourful variants have the duke discovering it at an inn during the siege, or even improvising it himself.
Written evidence complicates the tale. The French name appears only in 1806, and neither mahonnaise nor the Spanish salsa mahonesa is recorded until decades after the siege. That year André Viard's Le Cuisinier Impérial swapped the roux in a remoulade for egg yolk and advised adding oil gradually, the first modern description of a stable cold emulsion. Antonin Carême wrote of a magnonaise in 1815, the same year mayonnaise shows up in English.
The gourmand Grimod de La Reynière rejected both names, sniffing that mayonnaise was not a French word and Mahón had no culinary reputation. He preferred bayonnaise, after Bayonne and its celebrated hams, and some suspect that spelling drifted into the modern word. Escoffier later ranked it the mother sauce of cold sauces, the starting point for tartar sauce, remoulade and rouille.
Source: Mayonnaise
