Liver and Onions

"Stanley slowly peeled an onion. He liked eating them one layer at a time." -- Holes, by Louis Sachar
"Is it possible to fall in love over a dish of onions?" -- The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene

The Duck and Pork Terrine, buttoned up in bacon.

One of my favorite things about prep work is the way the projects lull me into a reverie about the past, about food in general, and the underpinnings of a life spent in the Industry. The grisly tasks especially, like prying pig cheeks apart from a frozen, 60 pound mass of them in the bottom of the back sink, or searing duck livers in a rondeaux sitting on a knee-level flame, one arm thrown up before my face to protect myself from spatters –the grisly tasks especially encourage a wandering mind.

The terrines are perfect examples. We make two different types: Duck and Chicken Liver, and Pork and Duck (that one has pistachios and is wrapped in bacon). The name “terrine” refers to the vessel in which the mixture is cooked – and because it is a French-style offering, the mixture could be just about anything: finches with raisins, goldfish and chanterelle, horsemeat and black walnuts. You name it. Grind it up, put it in what is, for all intents and purposes, an elongated meatloaf pan, cook it or not, and call it a Fancy Appetizer. Pairs wonderfully well with wines from the Côtes du Rhône.

Both terrines are time-consuming processes, but the liver terrine leaves me with bits of ground liver in my hair and smeared across my cheeks. Globs of it spatter my glasses as I pound it through a fine-mesh sieve. When I leave work after making the liver terrine, I am followed home by cats; the next day there is a feline cotillion on my front stoop, so many cats that I wonder if they are bearing an invitation for me to attend Dogwarts School of Seeing-Eyed Dog Trainers. (A girl can dream.) As messy as it is, however, this Fancy App is also fairly simple:

Liver Terrine
5 lbs duck livers
5 lbs chicken livers
Salt and Pepper
Olive Oil to cook

1 ½ c chopped shallots
2 Tbs minced garlic
1 c Madeira
1 c Brandy

2 lbs butter, cubed
1 c heavy cream whipped into soft peaks

You will also need:
A large saute' pan
A Robot Coupe, Cuisinart, or, God help you, a Food Mill
A 24” Terrine, sprayed and lined with Cling Wrap
Some Fortitude

(Please note the batch size of this recipe; home cooks should scale back.)

Heat the oil in the pan. Meanwhile, blot any blood from the livers (dry flesh sears better) and liberally sprinkle salt and pepper across the organs.

Carefully place the livers in a single layer across the bottom of the pan. This should be pretty fast and furious – you want a nice brown exterior, with a bit of rose left in the center of the liver. When you are satisfied with your sear, transfer the livers to a large mixing bowl.
Add some shallots and garlic and sauté gently for about two minutes. Deglaze with some of the booze. Let this reduce until the bubbles are the size of quarters. WATCH CAREFULLY.

Spatulate this mixture into the mixing bowl with the livers.
Repeat process until all your livers are seared, all the garlic and shallots have been sautéed, and all your booze has been reduced.
 Throw the butter on top of the meat, etc. in the mixing bowl.
 
As the butter softens, set up your Grinding/Pounding Area. I like to have the full mixing bowl on the left of the prep counter, the Robot Coupe (Robo Cop) in the middle, and an 8-qt. cambro cradling a chinoise on the right. I also make sure there is a place to set the liver-filled chinoise down as you transfer the finished mixture into yet a third container. You’ll work out a system – you just want to avoid introducing any grainy bits of the ground mixture into the container holding the finished mixture.

In stages, grind the liver mixture, transfer it into the sieve (chinoise), wrap your arms around the base of the cambro and smash the hell out of the mix with the base of a 6 oz ladle to push it through the fine metal mesh. Careful! This is when the liver dance really starts to get messy!

Repeat process until all the mix has been grounded and pounded.

Wash face and change apron.

Someone, you or a kitchen elf, should have already whipped the cream and lined a sprayed terrine with plastic.
Fold the cream into the smooth liver mixture. Taste to correct for salt. Some people add a drizzle of Truffle Oil at this stage. I do not.

Pour into the lined terrine and wrap the plastic over the top of the loaf. Label, date, refrigerate.

After it sets for at least 24 hours, serve in slices with a drizzle of fancy olive oil, some North Atlantic grey salt (kidding! Any large crystal salt is fine), a dollop of dijon and crustinis. A tuft of salted, oil-drizzled herbs, especially chervil and parsley, is nice with this. Makes approximately 110 portions.

See? Piece of cake.

During the course of the terrine's preparation, I snack on bits of seared livers and, without fail, the flavors of iron, earthy-nuttiness and Mailard caramel take me back to suppertime, circa 1978: Liver and Onions. Whether in the Poseys' house or down and across the way at the neighboring Kugel household, Liver and Onions was a dinner fixture, at least twice a month during the good times, and I have a very clear recollection of putting it down as my "Favorite Meal" during a Fourth Grade Survey.

This reminiscence is spurred forward by the almost unbearable onionyness of the back kitchen. As this is (ostensibly) a Cajun-Creole house, we go through about 50 gallons of Trinity – onions, green peppers, and celery – a week. Also, everything is cooked with garlic, and garnished with chives or scallions, or fried shallots. Or fried leeks. So the prep list is usually heavy on the alliums. It is interesting that lillies, the flowering cousins of onions and garlic -- are so heavily perfumed: Victorian ladies living in a tannery town.

On the really bad days, when the list dictates filling a 22 qt container with diced onions, and another one with sliced onions, along with 12 qts of green onions, and 20 pounds of shallot brunoise, the kitchen fills with fumes and we weep as though watching “War Horse.” We gasp and stagger and clutch at our faces. We are inconsolable.

The smell comes from sulfuric compounds that the onion pulls up from the soil – “sweet” onions are grown in less sulfury areas. These sulfuric compounds are held in storage areas and can only be released if a certain enzyme turns the key. This enzyme is released when the knife cuts through the onion’s skin and damages the enzyme’s storage vacuole– think of a jailor who, finding his office destroyed by an unseen, terrifying force, rushes from cage to cage, freeing the sulfuric monsters within…There’s something about this that reminds me of “The Chronicles of Riddick”…. Sure, we could have probably helped our cause by chilling the onions first, but we didn’t and now we are in the grip of a terrible alliumic sorrow. 

The sulfuric stink is so different from the pleasure derived from a whiff of onions cooking in butter, a smell I associate with comfort and warmth, hearth and home. (Listed as one of my "Favorite Smells" in the same Fourth Grade Survey, along with Thunderstorms, Lilacs, and the Pads of a Dog's Foot.) If you are running behind in your preparation for a dinner party, get the onions started in butter and your guests will walk into a home redolent of promise. To achieve really good caramelization, go low and slow for a while to “melt” the onions, then bump up the heat – a little – and don’t stir very often. 

Liver and onions is one of those dishes you don’t see on menus very often anymore. This could be because the liver is the body’s filter, and to be good it needs to come from an animal that wasn’t pumped full of antibiotics and growth hormones during its short trip from birth to butcher. Also, I don’t like tasting the nasty metallic flavors of adrenalin and fear hormones that flood the creature’s system as it nears the end, flavors much more apparent in the liver than in the flesh. Abbatoir terroir. But, better livers can be found if one cares to try. In Seattle there are enough small butcheries, not to mention a certain prediliction toward better food, that finding a plump liver from a happy calf who died while laughing over a slice of blueberry pie is not outside the realm of the possible. Once in hand, I’d dry the organ, season it and set it aside. Then I’d start the onions in butter and get changed for company. As the calf’s liver is not the only liver to be tended to, I’d also make a martini.

When the onions are almost done and company had arrived (more martinis), I’d sear the liver over a pretty high heat, quickly on each side. Serve with caramelized onions, a simple salad, buttered bread, wine, and stories about shared history. My favorite flavors.

Recipe #3: Frog Pond Pasta with Salsify Slivers

“Wasn’t it made clear that civilization is not an end in itself but a theater or gymnasium in which the evolving individual finds facilities for practice? And when it comes to themes, how about the – but wait a minute. Hold on. I’ve been trapped.” -- Still Life With Woodpecker, A Sort of Love Story, by Tom Robbins

A couple of weeks ago I ordered a pound of salsify and brought it home so I could experiment with different recipes. What a lark, I thought, cooking for fun!

As a single person, and not an especially domestic one at that, I must confess to a slight sense of the Why-Would-Yas when I visit my tiny kitchen with its orderly row of hanging pans, the sink empty of all dishes but this morning’s coffee mug: why would I mess this up to cook for myself? This is a question directed toward one of my arachnid roommates, a long-legged spider crossing the ceiling, too busy to answer. She’s probably on her way to confront her terror of being trapped, yet again, in the bathtub. (Note to self: check tub before taking out contact lenses.) Because I cook professionally for hundreds and hundreds of strangers, I don’t spend much time feeding myself, though when I do, I garnish the plates. It's not that I don't like to cook, it is more a matter of fatigue and my innate unwillingness to take a busman’s holiday: thinking about cooking for one makes me feel tired enough to just go to a restaurant.

Anyway, I’d managed to convince myself that this would be a good experiment, so, as always, I turned to the cookbook shelf and began digging for information.

Escoffier, naturally, had some recipes tucked into the Larousse Gastronomique. You know how he gets. And McGee illuminated the family relationship that exists between salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius), scorzonera (a.k.a. black salsify), burdock (a.k.a. gobo) and other members of the lettuce family, including thistles (a.k.a. artichokes) and sunchokes (a.k.a. Jerusalem artichokes) and talked a bit about fructose chains and carbohydrate stores, so there was that. Online sources were keen on the above-ground appearance of salsify, because it looks so much like a fluffy dandelion when it has gone to seed. On a recent walk around town, as I passed stands of feral fennel, rosehips ready for jams and teas, nettles sprung up in vacant lots, chestnut trees that will litter the ground with sweet knobs of proteins and carbohydrates in about six weeks, blackberries galore and fruit trees, productive but twisted from age, I reflected on the usefulness of knowing what salsify looks like above ground, should one ever have to forage for food in a post-apocalyptic Seattle. Arriving home after said jaunt, I confronted the as-yet-untouched bag of salsify languishing in the corner of my half-fridge. It was time to knuckle down and have some fun, dammit.

In appearance, salsify resembles a well-chewed stick abandoned by a forgetful Labrador. In name, Salsify may as well have been one of the rabbits left behind to fend for themselves in the Sandleford Warren, along with his glum, mathy friend Celeriac, and the long-lashed doe, Lamb’s Quarter…

And then the truth hit me.

I didn’t care about salsify. The most fun thing about it was its Latin name. I prefer the knobby, humble sunchoke and the sweet cynar flavor of artichokes. Hell, I prefer lettuce. But, I didn’t want the roots dissolving into a loosely contained pool of brown goo in the fridge (how wasteful) so I continued marching along.

Salsify is also known as “oyster plant,” which does nothing to inspire me, either – as much as I love oysters, I do not think about the details of molluskular anatomy and texture as I devour half a dozen Kushis in as many minutes. Perhaps it was a mark of the times that canned salsify was labeled “Oyster Plant,” as though sophistication was but a crank of the can opener away. As though a root that tasted of oysters was good news to the homemakers of yore. At last! All that goodness trapped in an easy-to-use canned form!

I mention yore homemakers because in my desultory search for either a recipe for salsify, or a new angle from which I might view the root and maybe even catch my ankle on something inspiring, I turned to Favorite Recipes of America, a collection of cookbooks made charming by age, sentimentality (my sister found them and gave them to me), the food, the photos of food, past owners’ pencil ticks next to some of the recipes, and the surprising amount and quality of ephemera that slips from between the cookbooks’ pages as I flip through.

I could digress, thinking about what it must have meant to Mrs. Antone Zelasko, of Tamaroa, Ill., to have her Illinois State Fair winning recipe for “Pineapple Secrets” included in a Volume I: Desserts, including party beverages. Or the frisson of pleasure that must have tickled Mrs. Sheryl Beckmann, Home Economics Teacher, Coleman, S. D., when her recipe for “Heart Stroganoff” found a place in Volume II: Meats, including seafood and poultry. Mrs. S. A. Hunt, Jr. of Columbia , S.C., must have been delighted when her recipe for “A Man’s Salad” was selected from the many offerings at the Favorite Recipes Food Fair for Volume III: Salads, including appetizers.

(Having read this last recipe – Lettuce; Pickled beets, sliced; Hard-boiled eggs, sliced; Bermuda or red onions, thinly sliced; Mayonnaise. Make bed of crisp, very green lettuce. Place slices of pickled beets on lettuce, adding slices of hard-boiled eggs and onion rings. Top with mayonnaise. Lemon juice may be substituted for mayonnaise and asparagus for beets – I have to wonder what one does with A Man’s Salad, either the beet or the asparagus version, when one has finished its preparation. Should I leave the salad outside on the porch and peer through the curtains, ready to pounce? Shall I place a plate next to a concealed pit and watch from a blind up in the trees? And what do I do if I catch one? To each her own, whispers the spider as she disappears into a corner.)

These women, their communities, their food: all so evocative of time and place. If one truly wanted to avoid writing about salsify, one could go on at some length about the sense of connectedness that forever comes from sharing recipes, and how, through these collections, one can catch a glimpse of lives – the newly wedded Mrs. Garrett Ballew, stationed on Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., writing about “Veal With Vegetables,” perhaps her mother’s recipe, tucked into a hope chest and pulled out when Mr. Garrett Ballew brought some of his pilot buddies and their wives over for dinner. Or the Midwestern wholesomeness and hint toward the proximity of a decent kitchen garden, maybe a small orchard….maybe a few hens…seen in Mrs. Chris Jacobs’, Topeka, Kansas, recipe for “Cauliflower and Apple Salad,” from Volume III, a salad recipe made more notable by the absence of gelatin, a key ingredient to many favorites, including “Celery-Pepper Congealed Salad,” by Virginia L. Langston, Baton Rouge, LA. Please do not bring that salad to my next dinner party.

Of course, that’s what these cookbooks are for – the sheer number of contributing Home Economics Teachers is a dead giveaway – these books are meant to assist young people, almost exclusively women, with the making of home and keeping of family, with developing a sense of community, and the delicious sense that comes from cooking and sharing the feast that one is contributing to the greater good – that sharing actually is caring. These are “Tuna Unusual” casseroles (Mrs. John J. McHugh, Salt Lake City, Utah) carried to homes struck by tragedy. These are celebratory “Marshmallow Christmas Wreaths” (Sue A. Arnhold, Denver, Colo.) handed out to earnest carolers.

If I wanted to really stray from the salsify path, just wander right off into the woods, I could describe the section in the back of each volume that introduces the reader to Foreign Foods, like Mrs. Charles M. Thomas’ (Dover, N.J.) recipe for “Sjomansbiff,” and how the increased availability of certain ingredients in the heartland, combined with the culinary adventurousness of military wives, made dishes like “Nasi Goreng ” available to homemakers besides Mrs. Edward W. Sznyter, Jr. (Officers’ Wives’ Club, Honolulu, Hawaii). And then I wonder whether the... what? condescension? contempt? comraderie? we might feel toward our community cookbook-contributing forebearers and the evolving definition of "Conventionality" have anything to do with our attitudes about food.

Instead I try to stay on track.

Volume V: Vegetables, including fruits yielded results. Tucked in among recipes for “Sweet Rutabaga” (Fran Mollet, Conde, S.D.) and “Baked Spinach” (Elizabeth Curry, Home Economics Teacher, Marianna, Fla.), there are two recipes for salsify.

Mrs. Kenny Lehto, of Burbank, Cal., gave us “Boiled Oyster Plants,” which sounds tempting in a late Medieval sort of way, and Louise Hunt, of Kevil, Ky., offered “Salsify Casserole” (which was conspicuously absent from Volume IV: Casseroles, including breads), a wintery dish of oyster plants – canned or fresh— layered with crumbled crackers and then baked with salt, pepper, margarine and milk. If it were nuclear-winter cold outside I might try this, perhaps with a bit of shaved nutmeg and a bit of goat cheese. I’d also use butter instead of margarine, but that’s how I roll.

But it isn’t cold outside. It’s high summer here in Seattle, with temperatures rising well into the high seventies, the city sluggish beneath the heat. The patch of dirt outside my apartment has yielded a bumper crop of nasturtiums, mint, thyme, rosemary and various inedibles. It would be fun to try to incorporate some of these ingredients, as well…..

This train of thought is interrupted by the phone’s quiet announcement that a text message has arrived. And look! An invitation to a dinner party! What fun! I am galvanized, utterly relieved that I won’t be cooking salsify for one. I feel ready to participate, contribute, cook for others in an unpaid capacity! I look around to tell the spider, but she is nowhere to be found, not even in the obvious places like shoes and hairbrushes.

Without her vote of confidence, then, I text back an offer to Bring A Dish to share. Because suddenly I did care about salsify, after all.

Frog Pond Pasta with Salsify Slivers 1 box pearled cous cous or pastini
¼ cup olive oil, plus 2 Tbs for drizzling and 2 Tbs for cooking
1 Tbs lemon zest
1 tsp Rosemary, picked and finely chopped
1 tsp Lemon Thyme, picked and finely chopped
3 Tbs Mint, chiffonade
1 English Cucumber, peeled, halved, sliced on a medium bias
½ cup dried Cranberries, rough chop (currants would have been better, but I’m fresh out)
½ a Shallot, brunoise
½ # Salsify, peeled and “whittled” into slivers (if you’re not cooking these immediately, keep them in a lemon water solution to prevent browning)
1 tsp fresh cracked Black Pepper
1 tsp Red Sea Salt
5 Bug-free Nasturtium leaves and blossoms

1. Cook pearled pasta/cous cous until just done. Drain, spread in a thin layer on a cookie sheet or shallow baking dish, drizzle with 2 Tbs of olive oil and cool completely in the fridge.
2. As the pasta cooks, heat 2 Tbs of olive oil in a frying pan and cook the salsify slivers until golden brown, about 4 minutes over medium-high heat. Remove from pan and let drain on a paper-towel on a plate. Lightly salt while hot.
3. Combine ¼ cup Olive Oil, with herbs and lemon zest.
4. Assemble your mise en place.
5. Combine all ingredients – except for the Nasturtiums – with cooled pastini.
6. Dress and taste. Correct seasoning if necessary (this may need more salt if you like salty things).
7. Transfer pasta salad into a pretty bowl and garnish with Nasturtium Leaves and Blossoms in a whimsical, lily-pad sort of way.

Serves Six

Note: Almost any ingredient in this recipe may be substituted with an analog, though that’ll make it less frog-pondy.
Ms. R. R. Posey, BOH Booster Club, Seattle, W. A.

Notes From the Prep List

"The earth was soft and crumbling, with a scattering of the weeds that are found in cultivated fields -- fumitory, charlock, pimpernel and mayweed, all growing in the green gloom under the bean leaves. As the plants moved in the breeze, the sunlight dappled and speckled back and forth over the brown soil, the white pebbles and weeds. Yet in this ubiquitous restlessness there was nothing alarming, for the whole forest took part in it and the only sound was the soft, steady movement of the leaves." - Richard Adams, Watership Down


Peas came into season not too long ago, which means that Seattle's chefs are throwing handfuls of the legumes into just about everything, and prep cooks all over town have funny little green stains on their thumbnails. Fava beans were just moments behind peas -- a duo as frankly tiresome as two heiresses on a four-day martini bender. A restaurant as busy as ours goes through about four cases of fava beans a week. The trash overflows with green husks and feet tire from just standing in one place, shelling and shelling and shelling. But they are delicious, and the time spend shelling, blanching and hulling is great for strolling down the somewhat mossy and overgrown flagstone paths of memory.

My thoughts turn toward childhood, favorite destination for a wandering mind, and the Kugels' garden. Their patch was a regular smorgasbord for a pair of browsing children: strawberries, snap peas, corn pulled from the stalk and eaten raw. In the vines that climbed through the stand of corn, I'd catch an occasional glimpse of a sleek green zucchini surrounded by crumpled apricot-colored blossoms and know that the dread -- and wonder -- of vegetable breads was right around the corner, as almost every household on that particular shelf of Sugarloaf Mountain harvested enough of the squash to keep the elementary schools open through bake sales...kitchen counters were practically lousy with them.... The zucchini path beckons, so I shake myself back into the present and put on a pot of water to boil, salt it heavily (though not as heavily as I'm supposed to), and prepare an ice bath to shock the peas after their quick dunk in boiling water.

Guy recently planted peas on the back porch of his house, out where he parks the car, so he'd have a snack when arriving and departing. I've decided to try this idea as well, except I went for a blueberry bush instead of planting peas. Now I have to fight through a small flock of rapacious birds to reach my front door. Peas may have been the better choice.

Forced to choose between peas and fava beans, I will always choose peas. They are yummier, less steppy, and peas lack the power to evoke Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal of one of fiction’s scariest monsters. And then there’s favism, which sounds like the punchline to a joke about nepotism, but is actually one of those ancient enzyme deficiencies that may have at one point suppressed malarial parasites in red blood cells, but now just leads to serious anemia. Peas just seem cheerier.

A monkey could be trained to shell peas, though it would eat most of them. One doesn’t really want a monkey in the kitchen. Maybe a small child, though I don’t really want one of those in the kitchen, either. But there’s some kind of historical precedent there – back porch, long afternoons, dogs lolling in the shade of the arbor, many hands, both old and young, making light work. I think if we put an ad on Craigslist we could probably drum up some kind of multigenerational team of shellers. And then I look around the kitchen, at the very young pantry girl, the line cooks all in various stages of the late, late adolescence that we like to call “their Twenties”, the slightly wizened dishwashers who shell peas and hull fava beans between running loads of plates and silverware, and I realize that we already have a pretty good multigenerational/multinational shelling team. We could probably take this on the road. Sell tickets, even.

If I had my McGee with me here at work, and a better command of Spanish, I could tell the guys about the nitrogen fixing properties of legumes, that they are actually a fruit, not a vegetable, they are weirdly healthy for humans... I could tell them stories about legumes’ ancient cultivation – 9,000 years! Imagine that! I could even speculate about the co-evolution of legumes and humans. (And despite the work done by Gregor Mendel, we still haven’t managed to breed a pea that will open upon command.) I could tell them that four prominent Roman families (Fabius, Lentulus, Piso and Cicero) took their names from legumes (Fava beans, lentils, peas and chick peas, respectively). And perhaps most fun of all, I could tell my co-shuckers and shellers that beans and peas comprise the third largest family in the flowering plant world (after orchids and daisies) and, after cereals, they are the second most important to the human diet. That would lead to a treatise on the soybean, however, another path beckoning, another story left for later. Instead I mention that los dining room neccesitas mas chucharos.

Two quarts finished.

Left alone in the walk-in, the peas will rev up their little motors and start turning their sweetness into starchiness. After a day or two, tiny nubs appear, and the pea takes on the form of a sprouting seed, which is harder to throw into boiling water. Seems a bit sad to toss a tiny vessel of optimism into the pot. Invariably, at this point my thoughts turn toward the Siege of Leningrad, the food bank, and the scientists inside who starved to death surrounded by seeds and peas, while the city starved outside. This line of thinking leads to a furrowed brow, however, and one of the cooks stops next to me on his way back to the line from the walk-in and asks for a smile. I can do that.

The mind wanders. Risi pisi. Petite pois. Mushy peas. Split pea soup. Bags of frozen peas hardening into a solid block in the freezer, satisfyingly shatterable when a handful of green ice balls are thrown into a creamy bowl of macaroni and cheese. Gotta get your vegetables.

And look! The case of peas is shelled! We have but a meager three quarts for our labor, but I have the satisfaction of drawing a line through the item on the prep list.

The next item is “Roll Gnocchi.” Another path beckons….

Hold the Mayo

Vincent: ...you know what they put on french fries in Holland instead of ketchup?
Jules: What?
Vincent: Mayonnaise.
Jules: Goddamn!
- "Pulp Fiction," by Quentin Tarantino

My relationship with mayonnaise began with all the promise of young love: Obsession, wild cravings, and, at last, a midnight rendezvous on the moonlit kitchen counter with a large spoon and a jar of Hellmann's®. I remember taking as large a spoonful of mayonnaise as a six year old girl could. My childhood affair with mayo ended somewhat violently that night, and if I dwell on the memory, I feel a bit woozy with regret. But time healed that culinary injury and I now name mayonnaise my favorite condiment. Although by the end of this piece that may no longer be the case.

The other day, my buddy Guy looked up from reading a menu description of a sandwich served with basil aioli and asked me, “So, when do we get to go back to just ‘mayo’?” The question made me wonder, have we reached a point in the evolution of diners where it is safe to assume that aioli equals mayonnaise in popular understanding? How different are they really?

Well, both are emulsifications – a temporary union between two substances that have nothing in common (water and oil, for example), brought together by a third substance (the emulsifier) (how’s that for a super hero name?) that helps the other two get along and can therefore create a sauce that is greater than the sum of its parts, but is still, by its very nature, unstable. What sounds like a stressful relationship is made more so by the fact that the oil droplets have to be whipped, beaten, pounded, shattered into a billion smaller droplets very slowly to allow the emulsifying agent time to do its work….

Without spending too much time describing the molecular structure of mayonnaise, think of a huge stack of clove-studded oranges piled up in a swimming pool filled with water. The cloves are the yolk’s emulsifying granules which break up and gamely surround the dispersed oil droplets – the oranges – sinking their oil-loving tail into the oil droplet while their positively charged “head” sticks out into the “continuous phase” (the water) of the emulsification and simultaneously repels the other droplets so the structure doesn’t collapse into a runny, oily pool. (The clove-studded orange provides a useful visual image, but it is a flawed analogy because the oranges would remain discrete objects with the removal of the cloves – they wouldn’t flow together to form a huge orange, even though that’d be cool. Instead, think of a screaming group of three-year-olds standing next to a pool. One by one, the group is separated into the pool where they are fitted with water-wings. It takes forever to split up the children, especially the sets of twins. Finally, the toddlers are all paddling around, unable to get too close to each other. That is an emulsification of children and pool, aided by the water wings. Remove the inflatable arm bands and the children cluster back together in their original state of being a screaming group.)

Aioli is traditionally made with garlic and oil, using a mortar and pestle, sometimes stabilized with bits of bread (as in the Greek skordalia), or potato (a situation in which the starch is acting as the emulsifier). In Spain, the Catalans put great store by their Allioli, which is perhaps the pinnacle of a garlic and oil emulsion, as it historically contained no other ingredients. According to one source, however, the time-consuming method of pounding the garlic and adding the oil drop by drop is falling out of favor in the modern world of the Cuisinart®, and egg yolks are starting to be used as a way of stabilizing the garlicky paste.

Mayonnaise is an emulsification of oil that uses eggs (really the yolks, which are themselves an emulsion of fat in water) to stabilize the final product. Unlike a charmingly rustic aioli, mayonnaise is eminently French, with all that that implies. Reading about the furious debate that surrounds the origins of the sauce, especially its name, spurs in me an almost irrepressible urge to end every sentence with some French flair: Some say the name comes from the French victory at Mahon (“Oo la la!”), others say the name “magnonaise” and claim it is a derivative of the French verb “to stir” – manier (“But how can zat be? Zere are zo many stirred sauces!”), while a third story holds that the name comes from the old French word moyeu, which means “yolk of egg.” (“Oui, oui! But ov courze!”)

All the restaurants I’ve worked for in the past decade make their own aioli (or mayonnaise), flavored with garlic, sometimes lemon or basil or chipotle (not all at the same time). But there was a time when I worked in houses that ordered mayonnaise in large quantities – the five-gallon container. On the big buckets that arrive at a restaurant’s back door, there is a warning about drowning hazards with a small drawing of a toddler tipping headfirst into the bucket; I can’t help but think, every time I see the picture of that clumsy, curly-headed child falling face-first into the bucket, that drowning in mayonnaise would be really awful, worse than drowning among pickles or blocks of feta cheese. Although the latter is a very close second.

In any case, the mayonnaise/aioli story is not without a narrative thrust – one can imagine the boat routes taken around the Mediterranean, and the ancient Roman’s proclivity toward planting olive trees and vineyards on every shore they landed upon was certainly an unforeseen benefit of imperialistic expansion. The world is criss-crossed with such migratory patterns of foods. These are the lines of history, exploration, and exploitation: not just the Roman’s spread of olive oil and vineyards, but also the Portuguese and Spanish bearing the chained-up flavors of Africa to the New World, and back again…

Guy looks up from his sandwich and interrupts me to ask where Miracle Whip fits into the mayonnaise-aioli story.

Well, okay. Let’s take a look.

As with the origins of the name “mayonnaise,” there seems to be some debate about the where the name “Miracle Whip” came from. Sources tend to agree, however, that this tangy emulsification hit the marketplace during the Great Depression, when folks could no longer afford the luxury of real mayonnaise. Miracle Whip® is going through a bit of a renaissance, right now, with advertising campaigns that highlight the fact that this “salad dressing” really isn’t for everyone. I’ve always liked ads like these, and it’s tempting to “Like” Miracle Whip® on Facebook™, even though I really don’t like Miracle Whip® in real life, especially not on french fries.

The migratory pattern of ingredients in this country is not unlike the spread of olive oil around the Mediterranean. So, the spread of mayonnaise in America began in New York City when a German immigrant named Richard Hellmann opened a deli. The popularity of his wife’s mayonnaise eventually led Richard Hellmann to open a mayonnaise factory (the American Dream!). A west-coast company called Best Foods® decided to jump on the mayonnaise spread-wagon, and voila! Hellmann’s® became the mayonnaise east of the Rockies, while Best Foods® held down the market to the west of the Continental Divide. Best Foods® eventually bought Hellmann’s® and, rather than try to force one brand on the entire country, the company retained the two names and tied them together with the Blue Ribbon familiar to all American mayonnaise eaters.

It is at this point in the story that I began feeling genuinely woozy, as though I'd kicked over a rock to reveal the squirmy things beneath it, and black helicopters will appear over my little house one night.

Large-scale corporate acquisition is not unlike the spread of the Roman Empire - just as Miracle Whip® belongs to the global behemoth Kraft®, Hellmann’s®/Best Foods® lives beneath the Unilever corporate umbrella.

Guy takes a sip from his cocktail and asks, “Unilever?”

Unilever is an enormous corporate empire, with a very friendly website, where they tell us that they are spending some time and money on things like Sustainability and Non-Evil Corporate Practices, for example, the large-font announcement that Hellmann’s® mayo is moving toward using only cage-free eggs. (There are some wild rumors flying around that Proctor and Gamble might acquire Unilever; you heard it here first.)Unilever places its origins in the late 19th century, when a guy named William Hesketh Lever invented a new kind of soap “to make cleanliness commonplace” in super-stinky Victorian England. Over the next one hundred years, Unilever acquired food brands such as Ben & Jerry’s®, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter®, Klondike®, Knorrs® and others. Unilever’s personal hygiene department went on to include not only Lever’s 2000®, but also Axe®, Suave®, Noxema®, Dove®, Vaseline® and more. What these products have in common, besides the oft-touted hair conditioning effects of mayonnaise, is that they are all manipulated fats and oils.

Closing my eyes I can see huge vats of products in various stages of emulsification, vats filled with tallow and gelatinous materials trucked in from rendering factories all over America. Some of this mixture will be poured off, fragranced, and formed into soaps. The rest of it will find its way into supermarket freezer aisles, salad dressing sections, and the spread area. In this nightmarish factory, the idea of a clumsy, curly-headed toddler drowning in a vat of mass-produced mayonnaise suddenly seems much less funny and much more like a Sinclairian metaphor for early 21st Century living.

Granted, this is a somewhat irresponsible oversimplification of the process, and I must confess that a recent midnight rendezvous with my small jar of Best Foods® produced a very delicious fried egg sandwich, but I may begin making my own mayonnaise. Step off the grid, as it were. I’ve tried this twice – the first time produced a vile, runny concoction that forced me to take to my bed for half an hour, the second time yielded a delicious spread, perfect for turkey sandwiches. As long as no one asks where the turkey comes from.