The Bigot in Me.

The Last Acceptable Prejudice

There is no shortage of things tearing us apart. Gay versus straight. White versus black. The Constitution, for God’s sake, has become a Rorschach test. I consider myself a reasonable man. Generous in my sympathies. Willing to sit across from almost anyone and find common ground.

Almost.

There is one flaw I cannot get past. I don’t even want to try. Not politics. Not religion. Not the various catastrophic choices people make in their personal lives, which are frankly legion. But there is something more fundamental than any of that. Something that reveals a person’s true nature with a clarity that a psychologist never could. A detail about a person that once you know it, you are done. The generosity simply drains out of you and it does not come back.

It never surfaces in public. That is the insidious part. People keep it hidden, whether from shame or simple obliviousness is unclear. It emerges only in private, in homes, among people who feel comfortable enough to drop the performance. Someone you genuinely like. Someone whose judgment you have trusted.

You’re invited to lunch. It only happens at lunch and never in a public place.

Here’s how it goes down. The afternoon has been easy. You have been thinking, not for the first time, what excellent taste this person has.

Then they come out of the kitchen.

A plate. A BLT constructed with apparent care. White toast. Bacon that shatters at the touch. Tomato the color of a cardinal’s robe, blood red, vine-picked, serious. Lettuce in crisp, generous abundance. A pinot grigio so cold it sweats. Or a proper iced tea, steeped with mint and lemon. The conversation has been light and warm.

You pick up the sandwich. You bite.

The taste hits you. It’s an assault.

Miracle Whip. The sociopath’s condiment.

Let’s establish some facts, because facts matter, particularly when feelings are running this high.

Mayonnaise is one of the great achievements of Western civilization, which is not a sentence I deploy casually. An emulsion of egg yolk, oil, and acid, classically lemon juice or vinegar, it was almost certainly perfected in the kitchens of Mahón, Menorca, sometime in the eighteenth century, possibly to commemorate a French military victory, which is at least one thing the French have given us that nobody argues about. The technique is the whole point: the yolk provides lecithin, nature’s great matchmaker, coaxing oil and water into a stable, glossy, trembling union. Rich. Subtle. Sophisticated enough to step back and let everything else shine.

Making it yourself takes ten minutes and a minimal amount of patience. One egg yolk. Lemon. Salt. Then oil, neutral or lightly olive depending on your mood, added in the thinnest possible stream while you whisk until the whole business thickens into something that makes you feel, briefly, like a competent adult. Dijon if you’re being classical. Garlic and you have aioli, which is mayonnaise that has decided to be more interesting. The point is it’s yours. It tastes like a decision you made. Here is a video link to America’s Test Kitchen on how to make it yourself.

Miracle Whip is a culinary crime. Kraft introduced it in 1933, and the FDA has never let it call itself mayonnaise (true fact), which tells you everything. Real mayonnaise must contain at least 65% oil. Miracle Whip falls well short, padding itself out with sugar, paprika, and a proprietary spice blend that tastes like a flavor committee never reached consensus after a very long meeting. Sweeter. Thinner. It has the texture of a concession and the taste of one. Invented during the Depression, when real ingredients were a luxury. One appreciates the historical context, but the Depression ended.

Most of us buy our mayonnaise. I do most of the time. And even here people can screw it up. There is one answer east of the Rockies: Hellmann’s.

Richard Hellmann, a German immigrant, opened a delicatessen on Broadway in 1905 and started selling his wife’s mayonnaise by the spoonful. The jar that followed became an institution. Clean, properly fatty, unapologetic. In the West the same product goes by Best Foods, a name acquired during the brand’s westward expansion in the 1930s. Same recipe. Same mayo. Different label, same way a davenport is a sofa is a couch depending on which side of the country your grandmother grew up on.

There is, however, one acceptable deviation and it’s barely even that. One only.

Duke’s. Greenwood, South Carolina, 1917. Eugenia Duke started selling sandwiches to soldiers at Camp Sevier and they kept asking what she put in them. What she put in them was mayonnaise with no sugar whatsoever, which is the entire point and why the devotion it inspires resembles a religious conviction more than a condiment preference. Tangier than Hellmann’s. Slightly looser. Some claim it is savory. If someone in your life is a Duke’s person, the friendship might survive. But if it were me in a foxhole…Hellmann’s.

Miracle Whip people are another matter entirely. Some things cannot be bridged. This is one of them.

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