Oh, this mayonnaise: facts and myths about the most popular sauce

Today, on May 28, they celebrate the birthday of mayonnaise — one of the most popular sauces in our country.

On this day in 1756, in the French city of Mahon, mayonnaise was first mixed. And it was like this… During the Seven Years ' War (1756-1763), when the British occupied French lands, the troops of the Duke of Richelieu had a problem with food. Of all the products, only vegetable oil, eggs and lemons remained. The chef decided to mix these ingredients, resulting in an extremely delicious sauce, which was called "mayonnaise", that is," Mahon", since the French spelling of the name of the city of Mahon, where all this happened, is"Mahon".

On the birthday of the popular sauce, we invite you to get acquainted with the facts and myths about it.

Adherents of a healthy lifestyle avoid it, and fans of a dense meal add it to almost any dish. Mayonnaise is a cold, high-calorie sauce made using vegetable oil, egg yolks, vinegar (lemon juice), sugar, salt, mustard, and seasonings.

It is widely believed that mayonnaise is harmful to the body. This is not true! It consists of 60% vegetable oil. To improve digestion, you should consume a tablespoon of oil per day. Can you drink this spoon? And mayonnaise will provide you with the necessary dose of oil.

The more yolks the homemade mayonnaise contains, the tastier it is. However, the shelf life of this sauce is significantly reduced, and it also loses its taste faster.

Mayonnaise has a very positive effect: it promotes the absorption of food, which is extremely important for performance and well-being. However, this applies only to homemade mayonnaise. Store-bought sauces can still be harmful, as flavorings, thickeners, stabilizers, synthetic preservatives and flavor enhancers are used in the process of their preparation. Therefore, it is better to prepare homemade sauce in your kitchen.

Today, white sauce is common and loved all over the world. For example, in Belgium, it is added to almost every dish, from vegetable salads to meat delicacies. In Australia, it is customary to serve a salad of apples, sweet peppers and celery root, which is necessarily flavored with mayonnaise. Italians love sliced tomatoes mixed with mayonnaise. They also prepare meat, vegetable salads and spaghetti with it. The French season snails with cold sauce — this dish is considered a special delicacy. And the Dutch, in turn, dip French fries only in mayonnaise.

The original mayonnaise, prepared according to the classic recipe, contains only egg yolks and vegetable oil. Therefore, real mayonnaise is not suitable for baking products, since when heated, it will break down into its components.

Many buyers, choosing mayonnaise, first of all pay attention to the presence of egg yolk in the powder. This ingredient can affect your health because it contains quite a lot of cholesterol. However, now there are many types of mayonnaise, in which the egg yolk powder is either completely absent, or replaced with a safe analogue for health.

Mayonnaise prepared in an industrial way is often very different from home-made in composition and taste. Here the main goals are to reduce the cost, increase profitability and shelf life. Therefore, the cheapest ingredients are often used, preservatives are added, and various marketing techniques are used, such as adding olive oil without mentioning its quantity and quality.

The story of the Soviet people's love for mayonnaise goes back to the 30s, when Comrade Mikoyan went to the United States to exchange experience and, together with canned peas, brought from there lines for the industrial production of factory mayonnaise — an extremely cheap and high-calorie product.

Mayonnaise is just one of the many sauces in the world, invented to dress some salads and accompany cold dishes. But its modern distribution and availability, multiplied by the not always high level of culinary knowledge, has led to the fact that mayonnaise (mayanez, mayanezik, mazik, mayo, etc.) has become a kind of meme on the Internet and a symbol of careless home cooking, when the combination of products, their quality, freshness and cooking technology is not important: any shortcomings are filled with mayonnaise and laid out on the network for the exchange of experience.

Along with the habit of pouring mayonnaise (or whatever it is called, according to the label on the package) all in a row, there is another extreme — the rejection of mayonnaise in general in any form. Such people experience rejection at the very mention of the sauce. This is, of course, an inflection, because there are dishes where mayonnaise is quite appropriate.

In addition to ingestion, mayonnaise can be consumed externally… In mayonnaise, a surprisingly successful combination of substances for the effect on the skin: fats soften the skin, a salt solution promotes its hydration, egg yolk lecithin is an excellent activator and "rejuvenator", vinegar slightly loosens the skin and promotes the penetration of the drug into it, gives the skin an acidic reaction, which disinfects it; a small amount of mustard contained in mayonnaise causes an increased rush of blood to the skin and local acceleration of metabolism.

We congratulate everyone on the birthday of mayonnaise and invite you to listen to a fun song in honor of it!