Mayonnaise has two possible origins, as salsa mahonesa, developed in 18th century Mahon, on Minorca (also home of this lovely cheese), or, if you trust the Larousse Gastronomique, in France itself, a play on moyeu, the old French word for yolk. Both stories are likely nonsense, but I’m more inclined to believe the former, since the Larousse narrative leans on two dubious etymologies (the second involving Charles de Lorraine, duke of Mayenne) and a general stink of proprietary snootiness, while ignoring the great potential origin story of Armand de Vignerot du Plessis claiming the condiment for the French after driving the British out of Mahon in 1758. Either way, mayonnaise has spent the 256 years since building its rep as of the world’s most successful sauces, spreading out across the globe in such surprising and weird variations that they probably deserve their own series of posts (Mayonnaise World?). For now I’ll be focusing on Kewpie Mayo, the ubiquitous Japanese condiment marked with the unforgettable naked baby logo - a thinner, more pungent cousin to American mayonnaise, contained within a puzzlingly pliable plastic squeeze bottle. The biggest difference between Kewpie and American mayo is the substitution of whole eggs for pure egg yolks, which makes the Japanese concoction richer and more yellow in color. Kewpie also uses vegetable in place of canola oil, apple cider and/or rice vinegar instead of the usual white, and throws in a bonus sprinkle of MSG, the secret ingredient behind so many bargain-priced Asian delicacies and addictive American snacks. It also employs that vaguely disturbing Kewpie, which started out as a comic strip character created by illustrator, novelist and suffragette Rose O’Neill in 1909, the name a cute shortening of Cupid. In 1912 it was turned into a cheap porcelain doll by a German toy manufacturer, which subsequently became one of the United States’ first craze toys. 50 years later, the Kewpie served as quasi-inspiration for another comic strip, Kim Casali’s Love Is…, which closed the circle via its even-more-unsettling account of two naked babies in love. Kewpie dolls, having long since shed their porcelain exteriors for a more supple soft plastic, are also wildly popular in Japan, where they’ve spawned an anime series known as Kewpie Fusion. This is all immaterial to the food angle, which is complicated enough on its own. Now a staple condiment present in most refrigerators and slathered onto a surprising number of foods, Kewpie mayo is an important element of the Yōshoku wing of modern Japanese dining. Yōshoku refers to food introduced from abroad during and after the 1867 Meiji Restoration, when a power transfer ditched the existing Shogunate for an imperial system and threw open Japan’s long-closed borders, with a full embrace of Western culture declared as the best method of progress. The period since has been defined by a hall-of-mirrors embrace of unfamiliar ingredients, which are generally twisted into bizarre new configurations by the ancient power of Japanese culture. As the fantastic site Just Hungry notes in a post from 2004, it’s “immigrant food without the immigrants,” which can mean tame reinterpretations like the pasta profiled in a recent post, or completely off the wall inventions like octopus ice cream, hot-dog-crust pizza and Shiso Pepsi. The idea of mass marketing mayo in Japan originated in 1925, after Shokuhin Kogyo company executive Toichiro Nakashima took a trip to America, during which he was supposedly was struck by the fitness of the American youth, which he attributed to their rich, egg-heavy diet. As the story goes, he returned home with his own jar of mayo and proceeded to adapt the wonder product to supercharge the children of Japan, amping up the yolks for even more power. This is probably a corporate legend; it seems more likely that Nakashima simply saw the opening for this fashionable foreign condiment in an increasingly Westernized country, and then made subtle changes to suit it to the Japanese palette. The product gradually grew in reputation, expanding ever more rapidly as Japanese tastes adapted to the flood of Western goods during post-WWII occupation. Kewpie became so popular that Shokuhin renamed itself after its now-signature brand in 1957, another instance of stately old-guard traditionalism being replaced by wacky cartoon modernity. That impression is furthered by the omnipresent doll mascot, which falls in with the widespread Japanese attraction to doe-eyed American sprites, and may explain the pliable, rubber-doll-like squeeze of the bottle. There’s also something rebellious about the current fascination with pouring mayo on everything - be it relatively old-school snacks like okonomiyaki or the Dominos pizza pictured above - considering the clean, fresh focus of traditional food preparation, which prizes ritual preparations and scorns haphazard mixing of flavors. But cuisine changes, especially on an island nature beset on all sides by powerful culinary influences, and the current taste for mayo overindulgence isn’t really any stranger than the prevailing American practice of dousing everything with a thin, sugary tomato sauce. The Kewpie combos that result are also characteristically Japanese, creations of a culture which, despite a massive influx of alien flavors in the modern era, has never lost its unique focus, turning American toy totems and classic French sauces into distinctive nationalist items.
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The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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