A Mayonnaise Story

It's about mayonnaise...

Voiced by Ellen Anne Chong

Canva. It’s easy.

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As a kid, I believed that mayonnaise was the epitome of all things gross.

Bologna on white bread with, ugh, mayonnaise. This abomination was a brown-bag lunch staple way back in the before times. A time when kids carried food in greasy brown lunch bags, held tight in their hot little fists as they walked to school, accompanied only by their peers. A sandwich that teetered on the edge of going bad as it sat on the classroom coat closet shelf, waiting for the lunch bell to ring.

How we didn’t all die from food poisoning is beyond me.

Mom went to work when I was eight. After that horrible day, I had to make my own damn lunch every morning before I trudged off to my classroom at Los Cerritos Elementary School.

Among the lunch-making basics Mom provided were bread, bologna, and cotto salami. Not the real, thinly sliced yummy hard salami that often showed up in my friends’ lunch boxes, but the Oscar Mayer (or more likely a store-brand) cold-cut variety. Big and fatty, with peppercorns spiked throughout just for fun. And of course, mayonnaise and mustard were always in the fridge.

Secretly, I liked the cotto salami, but hid this fact from my friends who flaunted higher-grade treats in their lunch boxes. At least the cotto wasn’t bland bologna; it did have flavor and peppercorns. And, I put yellow mustard on it…I put yellow mustard on everything. I put it on the bland bologna when forced to use that in my sandwich after all the cotto salami was gone. Yellow mustard is delicious, and it ain’t mayo.

This with the addition of what was usually an apple, sustained my strength and got me through lunch recess, and then an afternoon spelling test. And then the walk home from school with my friends. Where we made cinnamon-sugar toast and washed it down with sugared Lipton tea. Brewed in a pot, not a teabag (thank you Mom for indulging in loose tea in a can). This after school ritual made us feel fancy.

An exception to the ‘no mayo’ rule I lived by was tuna fish.
I discovered that tuna sandwiches without mayo are inedible. I know better than this now because I am a grown-up. However, back then I figured out that mixing the mayo with something like tuna made the offensive oily white stuff palatable. This worked with hard-boiled eggs as well.

A tuna or egg salad sandwich was a satisfactory addition to a brown bag school lunch. They were neutral on the scale of what was considered ‘a good lunch’ by the kids who got to have real, thinly sliced hard salami sandwiches that their mothers lovingly made for them every morning.

Mom bought canned tuna for our lunch-makings as an alternative to the cold cuts. Unfortunately, she didn’t buy the then relatively new invention, plastic sandwich bags, thus forcing us to pack our tuna sandwiches in inexpensive waxed paper sandwich bags, or worse, we simply folded waxed paper around them.

These waxed paper wraps didn’t even seal the meal. I mean really, they remained open-ended, exposing the delicious tuna and the bread that cradled it to the air on the shelf in that classroom coat closet. This rendered the otherwise acceptable sandwich into a dry sponge by the time lunchtime rolled around. I looked on in envy at the kid across the table as she pulled a soft, fresh-looking Wonderbread sandwich from a protective plastic bag.

Again…how a mayonnaise-laden sandwich didn’t kill any children after sitting unrefrigerated in the classroom for half a day, is a mystery. Like many things children endured in the before times, it made us stronger.

One of my more traumatic memories surrounding this condiment is the homemade mayonnaise my father attempted to whip up on occasion.
It was runny. This did not get anywhere near convincing me that mayonnaise was an acceptable food source. In retrospect, he had probably accidentally made a fine aioli in his quest for mayonnaise that didn’t come out of a jar. Still, it was icky and I was not going to touch it.

I wish he were here today to make me some mayo, but it’s too late now. May he rest in peace with his mayo and my mother.

And oh, let’s not forget the worst of the worst. Even worse than my childhood’s worst (mayo), and the imposter of the bunch…a low point cranked out by the 20th-century American industrial food complex: Miracle Whip. Eeeeeeeewwwwww.

To this day, there is nothing worse than expecting mayonnaise and finding that your mouth is full of that cloying, weird taste of Miracle Whip. ’Nuff said about that.

I passed the spelling tests administered by the Los Cerritos Elementary teachers, and was eventually promoted on to junior high and later, high school. Somewhere in that journey, my palate became more sophisticated and I came to enjoy the white stuff. No, not the Miracle Whip (never). The mayo.

Learning to appreciate mayonnaise was a slow process that included the realization that the ‘secret sauce’ on a Jack in the Box fast-food hamburger is basically Thousand Island dressing, a condiment heavy on the mayo. I ate this dressing and liked it, and it dawned on me that perhaps, I had been unfair to mayo in my younger years.

The turning point that took me from disgust to tolerance of the queen of the oily white condiments may have actually happened before my Thousand Island dressing revelation.

I was confronted with a challenge, an “I dare you” thinly veiled in the form of a suggestion. This challenge was delivered by a neighbor kid who was a friend, cohort, and sometimes enemy. I bit him once, for good reason. But not on this occasion.

Anyhoo…Tommy (his real name) introduced me to the then popular peanut butter, mayo, and banana sandwich. I know…sounds absolutely barf inducing, right? His face wore a smirk as he delivered the ‘suggestion’ that I try one.

Yet, something in that weird combination of ingredients was compelling. It was different, risky. Yet, I believe it was the subtle dare that made me do it. I gathered the ingredients in my family’s modest kitchen. White bread, not Wonderbread like the cool kids got, but a dryer, less satisfying generic (thanks Mom), mayonnaise, and the bananas all went into a sandwich.

Tommy may or may not have witnessed the event, but I believe someone was there to watch me consume that sandwich. It was a dare, after all.

Huh. It was delicious. Go figure. I later discovered that this somewhat pedestrian concoction could be elevated to the gourmet level with the addition of a few juicy raisins and a bit of iceberg lettuce.

Things only got better from there.
Except, of course, bologna on white bread with mayo. That abomination must go.

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Thanks for reading! Until next time, Ellen Anne Chong