The Duc de Richelieu’s chef cannot find any cream

You do not have to go back far in British social history – the 1970s is far enough – to discover a civilisation in which the very mention of the word ‘mayonnaise’ was treated with the utmost suspicion. Like all food that came with a French appellation, mayonnaise was imagined to be some sort of mystical substance, the kind of extreme preparation one might only encounter in the pages of a book by Elizabeth David. It was looked on in Britain as a foodstuff – if one could give it that name – that was almost certainly poisonous to everyone who ate it – except the French, whose stomachs had been designed differently. At best, mayonnaise was viewed as an unnecessarily pretentious version of salad cream, which was a dressing that had been made sufficiently bland and uninteresting that it achieved great popularity in Britain.

Today, mayonnaise has become a normal part of everyday British life, a staple at barbecues and an oft-seen companion at picnics. It has moved beyond the delicatessen to carve its own niche on the shelves of corner shops up and down the land. This colonisation of Britain by a whipped-up egg-yolk-oil-vinegar-and-seasoning dressing is due largely to the efforts of her American cousins (at whose vanguard stands Richard Hellmann) and, of course, the daytime radio presenter Simon Mayo.

Despite all this, few Britons stop to think how mayonnaise got its name, or even how this particular confection came to exist at all. Its origins would appear to go back to the aftermath of a siege that took place on the island of Menorca (known as Minorca to the British) during the Seven Years War.

Menorca – which, with Majorca, Ibiza and Formentera, forms the Balearic Isles – lies off the east coast of Spain. An island of some 270 square miles, it has changed hands many times down the ages. In the mid-18th century it happened to belong to the British, who really had no business owning anything at all in the Mediterranean but who had got lucky in backing the winning side in the War of the Spanish Succession and had taken possession of it in 1713 under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht, one of the many European ententes that were to turn countless future schoolchildren off history forever.

The Seven Years War broke out in 1754. It was orchestrated by Britain, which opened hostilities against France, but it ended up dragging in most of the Continent’s major players. Two years into the war, the French, not unreasonably, decided to take the opportunity afforded by the conflict to renew their sovereignty over Menorca, an island whose excellent natural harbour at the capital, Mahón, made it a place of strategic importance.

The 60-year-old Duc de Richelieu, Louis François Armand de Vignerot du Plessis, was chosen for the task. He landed 15,000 troops on the island and laid siege to Fort St Philip, which was held by a garrison that was roughly a fifth of the size of the French force. In response, the British authorities called on Admiral John Byng to set sail for the Mediterranean island to lift the siege. He was given pitifully few resources with which to do so – just ten rather leaky ships. Byng protested loud and hard that he was being sent on a mission that had very little chance of succeeding but his objections were ignored. He half-heartedly engaged the French fleet on 19 May 1756. No ships were lost on either side before the French fleet withdrew, but roughly 40 sailors were killed on each side. Byng headed back to Gibraltar, seeking repairs to his ships.

After three months, with no end to the siege in sight, the British force in Fort St Philip surrendered and, rather sportingly, were accorded safe passage off the island. The Duc de Richelieu was naturally in high spirits after the victory, which had been gained at comparatively little loss of life. He ordered a great banquet to celebrate his triumph. Such a feast would naturally entail the rustling up of lashings of an egg-yolk-and-cream dressing of which the duke was particularly enamoured.

Unfortunately – perhaps because the island’s cows had been moved a safe distance from the siege – there was no cream to be had. This left the duke’s head chef in something of a quandary. It is not known whether he himself hit upon the idea of substituting olive oil for the cream, or whether a Menorcan suggested it to him. The latter is a distinct possibility since the island was well known for its aïoli. This is a similar dressing to mayonnaise, being an emulsion of olive oil and lemon juice to which egg yolk and a great deal of garlic is added – but no cream. Whatever happened, the newfangled sauce was hailed at the banquet as a roaring success. It was only natural that it should be christened with a name that would forever fix the location of that glorious victory in the French language. That location was Mahón and thus Richelieu himself is said to have named the dressing ‘sauce mahonnaise’, a term whose spelling drifted later to ‘mayonnaise’.

It must be admitted that there’s a clutch of other stories that proffer alternative origins for the sauce and its name. One is simply that it comes from the Old French word moyeu meaning ‘yolk’. Another is that mayonnaise was invented in the town of Bayonne in the southwest of France, and that over the years ‘sauce Bayonnaise’ transmuted into ‘sauce Mayonnaise’ (though there seems to be no indication of where or when this crossover took place).

And finally there is the tale of Charles de Lorraine, the Duc de Mayenne. The leader of the Catholic League is said to have been a devotee of the egg-based sauce. Indeed, he was so much of a fan that he allegedly arrived late to the Battle of Arques in 1589 because he had tarried so long over a dish of chicken slathered in ‘mayennaise’ and the battle was lost as a result. Consequently, his enemy, King Henry IV of France, held on to the key port of Dieppe, but since the duke purportedly ended up with his favourite sauce being named after him, there were no losers.

Unfortunately, as with the other two rival explanations, there is no solid evidence to back any of these stories beyond their linguistic similarities with the word ‘mayonnaise’. Furthermore, the battle raged on and off for 15 days, and only ended when 4,000 English troops, sent by Elizabeth I, arrived in support of Henry IV, so a defeat caused by a short delay to eat a delicious sauce seems somewhat far-fetched. As a result, most food historians and dictionary compilers opt for the Mahón tale as the most likely source of mayonnaise.

It was only a pity for the French that, when Britain gained the upper hand in the Seven Years War, the terms of the Treaty of Paris returned Menorca to British hands just seven years after it was lost. Since the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, the island has been Spanish. It has far more chance of joining with a future independent Catalonia to form a new nation than ever becoming French again. Still, if nothing else, the dressing maintains the sweet savour of revenge. The British may crow interminably about their victories over the French, as witnessed in Trafalgar Square and Waterloo Station, but the French have conquered huge parts of the world with their mayonnaise.