Mayonnaise is a thick sauce made primarily from vegetable oil and egg yolks. Whitish-yellow in color, it is a stable emulsion formed from the oil and yolks and is generally flavored with salt, pepper, vinegar and/or lemon juice, and frequently mustard. Mayonnaise is one of the basic sauces of classic French cooking; numerous other sauces can be created from it by adding additional seasonings (see below).

Origin of the name
"Mayonnaise" made its English-language

debut in a cookbook of 1841, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Mayonnaise is generally said to have been created by the chef of Louis François Armand du Plessis, duc de Richelieu in 1756, to celebrate the French military victory over the British at the port of Mahon (the capital of Minorca in the Balearic Islands, Spain). The French spelling for this Spanish port is "Mahón", and thus "sauce from Mahon" is "sauce mahónnaise", from which it was said the word "mayonnaise" was derived. This often-repeated story seems flawed, however, for reasons given below.

In another attempt, Antoine Carême speculated in 1833 that the name was derived from the French word manier, meaning "handle, feel, ply", thus possibly in this case "stir or blend". The Larousse Gastronomique 1961 reports, "However logical Careme's justification for the exclusive use of the term magnonaise may seem, we are not by any means convinced that it should take the place of the usual form, mayonnaise. Mayonnaise in our view, is a popular corruption of moyeunaise, derived from the very old French word moyeu, which means yolk of egg. For, when all is said, this sauce is nothing but an emulsion of egg yolks and oil."

Carême appears to have been straining to come up with an etymology for sauce Mayonnaise. It is inconceivable that Carême – trained by the greatest pâtissier in Napoleonic Paris, creator of French haute cuisine, and chef d'hotel to the duc de Talleyrand – would not know the history of the name, had mayonnaise actually been created as recently as 1756. Indeed, Talleyrand himself grew up under the Ancien regime (he had already held a bishopric), was a fastidious connoisseur of the table and moved in much the same circles as the Richelieu family, at the top of Parisian society, the very small world of tout Paris. Is stands to reason that the origin of "mayonnaise" must be much older than 1756, if it was obscure to Carême.

In fact it may appear more credible that sauce Mayennaise was originally named for Charles of Lorraine, Duke of Mayenne (in northwest France), who presided over the meeting of the Estates General in January 1593 that had been summoned for the purpose of choosing a Catholic ruler for France. The sauce may have remained unnamed until after the Battle of Arques in 1589. It may then have been christened "Mayennaise" after Charles de Lorraine, duc de Mayenne, because he took the time to finish his meal of chicken with cold sauce before being defeated in battle by Henri IV. The suggestion about the duc de Mayenne as the patron of sauce Mayonnaise was first made by the nineteenth-century culinary writer Pierre Lacam.

Another proposed etymology points to the French city of Bayonne; "mayonnaise" would be a corruption of bayonnaise.

Making mayonnaise
Mayonnaise is made by slowly adding oil to an egg yolk, mustard, vinegar, and salt. The mustard helps to keep the emulsion stable while whisking vigorously to disperse the oil into the liquid. Egg yolk contains lecithin, which acts as the emulsifier. All ingredients are added at the beginning of the process to prevent speckles. Adding the salt after emulsification can cause white speckles.

These steps produce the basic mayonnaise. Mayonnaise can be made with an electric mixer, an electric blender, or a food processor, or by hand with a whisk or even a fork. Using a whisk or fork, however, involves fairly tedious physical effort. Blenders and food processors are by far the quickest means of making mayonnaise; some people, however, feel that the end result is inferior to a hand-whisked product.

Adding a bit of mustard will stabilize the emulsion. This is because the small particles it contains serve as nucleation sites for the droplets forming the mayonnaise.

Traditional recipe
The traditional French recipe is essentially the same as the basic one described above, but it uses top-quality olive oil and vinegar. Some nouvelle cuisine recipes specify safflower oil. It is considered essential to constantly beat the mayonnaise using a whisk while adding the olive oil a drop at a time, fully incorporating the oil before adding the next tablespoon. Experienced cooks can judge when the mayonnaise is done by the emulsion's resistance to the beating action. Mayonnaise made this way may taste too strong or sharp to people accustomed to commercial products: in such a case it can be made blander by blending in some non-fat yogurt.

Composition
Homemade mayonnaise can approach 85% fat before the emulsion breaks down; commercial mayonnaises are more typically 70-80% fat. "Low fat" mayonnaise products contain starches, cellulose gel, or other ingredients to simulate the texture of real mayonnaise.

Commercial producers either pasteurize the yolks, freeze them and substitute water for most of their liquid, or use other emulsifiers. For homemade mayonnaise it is recommended using the freshest eggs possible. Some stores sell pasteurized eggs for home use. The eggs can also be coddled in 170°F (77°C) water, after which the hot yolks, now slightly cooked, are removed from the whites. Homemade mayonnaise will generally only keep under refrigeration for three to four days. A lower-fat version can be made with silken tofu.

Homemade mayonnaise can also be made using raw egg whites, with no yolks at all, if it is done at high speed in a food processor. The resulting texture appears to be the same, and – if seasoned, for example, with salt, pepper, mustard, lemon juice, vinegar, and a little paprika – the taste is similar to traditional mayonnaise made with egg yolks.

Use of Mayonnaise
Worldwide, mayonnaise is most commonly served in a sandwich or a burger, or with salad such as potato salad or canned tuna ("tuna mayo" / tuna salad). Regional uses are listed here.

In the US

Commercial mayonnaise sold in jars originated in New York City, in Manhattan's Upper West Side. In 1905, the first ready-made mayonnaise was sold at Richard Hellmann's delicatessen on Columbus Avenue, between 83rd and 84th Streets. In 1912, Mrs. Hellmann's mayonnaise was mass marketed and called Hellmann's Blue Ribbon Mayonnaise.

At about the same time that Hellmann's Mayonnaise was thriving on the East Coast of the United States, a California company, Best Foods, introduced their own mayonnaise, which turned out to be very popular in the western United States. Head-to-head competition between the two brands was averted when, in 1932, Best Foods bought out the Hellmann's brand. By then both mayonnaises had such commanding market shares in their own half of the country that it was decided that both brands be preserved. To this day, Best Foods Mayonnaise is only sold

west of the Rocky Mountains, while Hellmann's is sold east of the Rockies.

In the Southeastern part of the United States, Mrs. Eugenia Duke of Greenville, South Carolina founded the Duke's Product Company in 1917 to sell sandwiches to soldiers training at nearby Fort Sevier. Her homemade mayonnaise became so popular that her company began to focus exclusively on producing and selling the mayonnaise, eventually selling out to the C.F. Sauer company in 1929. Duke's Mayonnaise, still made to the original recipe, remains a popular brand of mayonnaise in the Southeast, although it is not generally available in other markets. Of special note to diabetics and hypoglycemics, Duke's mayonnaise is the only major mayonnaise available in the United States which does not include sugar as an ingredient. JFG coffee company of Knoxville, TN also produces an extremely popular southern mayonaise. This mayonaise was one of the first available in Eastern Tennessee and Southwest Viginia and remians the most popular brand in this area.

Europe
In northern Europe mayonnaise is often served on chips (french fries), especially in the Low Countries and Germany, as well as increasingly in the United Kingdom and France. It is also served with cold chicken or hard-boiled eggs in France.

Guidelines issued in September 1991 by Europe's Federation of the Condiment Sauce Industries recommend that oil and liquid egg yolk levels in mayonnaise should be at least 70% and 5% respectively, although this is not legislated. Most available brands easily exceed this target.

Japan
Japanese mayonnaise, typically made with rice vinegar, tastes somewhat different from mayonnaise made from distilled vinegar and is yellowish in appearance. It is most often sold in squishy plastic squeeze bottles. Apart from salads, it is popular with dishes such as okonomiyaki, takoyaki and yakisoba. It is sometimes served with cooked vegetables, or mixed with soy sauce or wasabi and used as dips. In the Tōkai region, it is a frequent condiment on hiyashi chuka (cold noodle salad).

Kewpie is the most popular brand of Japanese mayonnaise, advertised with a Kewpie doll logo.

Russia
Mayonnaise is very popular in Russia where it is made with sunflower seed oil which gives it a very distinctive flavor. A 2004 study showed that Russia is the only market in Europe where more mayonnaise is sold than ketchup by volume. Leading brands are Calve (marketed by Unilever) and Sloboda (marketed by Efko).

As a base for other sauces
Mayonnaise is one of the mother sauces of classic French cooking, so it is the base for many other chilled sauces and salad dressings. For example:

• Aïoli is olive oil mayonnaise combined with garlic.
• Rouille is aïoli with added red pepper or paprika.
• Tartar sauce is mayonnaise spiced with pickled cucumbers and onion. Capers, olives, and crushed hardboiled eggs are sometimes included. Often made with sweet pickle relish.
• Some types of Russian dressing (also known as Marie Rose sauce in Europe) combine mayonnaise with tomato sauce or ketchup and yoghurt or heavy cream added. In North America, however, most homemade varieties and all commercial brands of Russian dressing use little or no mayonnaise as a base. They are very dark red and sweet dressings made with vegetable oil, tomato paste, vinegar, sugar, and a variety of herbs and spices (often including mustard).
• Thousand Island dressing is a salmony-pink coloured dressing that combines tomato sauce and/or tomato ketchup, minced sweet pickles or sweet pickle relish, assorted herbs and spices (usually including mustard), and sometimes including chopped hard-boiled egg -- all thoroughly blended into a mayonnaise base. It is called " Thousand Island" dressing because it was first served at the Thousand Island Hotel in upstate New York (located in the American section of the Thousand Islands, on the U.S.-Canada border in the Saint Lawrence River).
• Fry sauce is a mixture of mayonnaise, ketchup or another red sauce (e.g. Tabasco sauce or Buffalo wing sauce), and spices, commonly eaten on french fries in Utah, southern Idaho, and rural Oregon.
• Mayonesa is a lime-flavored mayonnaise, usually found in Mexican or Spanish grocers in North America.
• Sauce rémoulade in classic French cuisine, according the Larousse Gastronomique, is mayonnaise to which has been added mustard, gherkins, capers, parsley, chervil, tarragon, and possibly anchovy essence [4]. It is quite different from most of the remoulade sauces that are frequently found in Louisiana and that generally do not have a mayonnaise base.
• Ranch dressing, is made of buttermilk or sour cream, mayonnaise, and minced green onion, along with other seasonings.