by Dixe Wills
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.
An artist creates a lemon juice container that looks exactly like a lemon
‘The law,’ opined the Scottish writer Dr Arbuthnot, at a time when it was already considered clichéd to think of it as merely an ass, ‘is a bottomless pit.’
In one way, it would be good if this were true. While the author of The History of John Bull certainly intended his observation to be taken as a condemnation, it could just about be interpreted as an accolade: that its limitless depths allow the law to accommodate every kind of malefactor, from the pettiest of petty criminals to the head of state who perpetuates the most heinous war crimes. Sadly though, this has never been true and it is unlikely that it will ever become so.
But even if the law often fails to bring down the world’s most reprehensible villains, one can still admire its sheer scope. No matter how obscure or contrived a circumstance, there is almost always a statute out there somewhere that can be brought to bear on it. Take, for example, the curious case of Reckitt & Colman Ltd vs Borden Inc: a three-year court battle over a plastic lemon juice container that was every bit as bitter as its contents and which ended up setting a legal precedent.
The story begins with a man called William Alec Gibson Pugh. An art-school graduate from East Ham in London, Pugh was in his
mid-twenties when he was headhunted in 1947 by a Leicestershire company called Cascelloid. Hoping to put the company at the forefront of the revolution in plastics, Cascelloid had imported a cutting-edge machine from the United States that was able to manufacture bottles by blowing plastic – only one other machine of its kind existed in the world at the time.
Using his artistic talents, Pugh began to experiment with original designs for bottles, his first being a teddy bear that contained baby powder. Later on in his career he was to fashion the famous fist-sized tomatoes that served as ketchup dispensers in cafés up and down the land. His finest hour, however, came in the 1950s when Cascelloid was approached by a company called Edward Hack Ltd. Their executives were keen to develop a novelty bottle to boost sales of their lemon juice.
According to his obituary in the Independent, Pugh carved a wooden core onto which he painstakingly stuck fresh lemon peel. Once he had the shape just right, he made a plaster mould of it. The result was a squeezy plastic lemon-juice container that was not only the size and colour of a lemon but looked exactly like a lemon (albeit one with a capped nozzle at one end) – details that were to cause something of a legal tangle decades later. Edward Hack found instant success selling its lemon juice in the plastic lemon at a shilling a time, under the brand name Hax.
Word of the innovation crossed the Atlantic, and soon several copycat plastic lemons filled with lemon juice were on sale in the United States. However, since Hax was not sold in America, there was no question of bringing legal proceedings against these companies for infringing design rights. In the meantime, Reckitt & Colman bought up Edward Hack and Hax was renamed Jif.
All went quietly onwards until the 1980s when a US firm called Borden, which sold its lemon juice in squeezy plastic lemons under the name ReaLemon, decided to start selling its product to Britain. Reckitt & Colman took exception to this and a writ was served. It was at this point that Bill Pugh’s attention to detail was suddenly recognised by the plaintiff ’s lawyers as something of a problem. The Jif lemon looked just like a natural lemon – just as it was supposed to do. It meant that there was nothing about it that made it recognisably a Reckitt & Colman-style lemon, and thus it was impossible to register as a trademark.
The case dragged on, passing up through the courts until it ended up at the House of Lords. A judgment was finally handed down in 1990, with the lords unanimously finding in favour of Reckitt & Colman.
The case is of lasting importance because of a three-part test on trademark infringement set out by Lord Oliver of Aylmerton, which has been handily summarised by Ernie Smith in the newsletter Tedium:
1. There must be an existing reputation that the public carries with the original product or design.
2. The competing product creates confusion or misrepresentation in the market, whether intentional or not.
3. There are signs that the confusion created by the competing product negatively impacts the bottom line of the original one.
As Lord Oliver succinctly put it, in his legal opinion: ‘Thus A can compete with B by copying his goods, provided that he does not do so in such a way as to suggest that his goods are those of B.’
The Law Society Gazette made a note of the case at the time: ‘Because it is a natural shape, a lemon cannot be registered as a design. But the Lords accepted that consumers were more likely to buy the lemon on account of shape rather than read the product’s label.’
All was not lost for Borden – the only thing it needed to do was change its own design sufficiently so that there was no longer any confusion between its ReaLemon and Reckitt & Colman’s Jif (since acquired by corporate leviathan Unilever) and it could carry on selling its product.
This unlikely lemon-juice war provided British jurisprudence with a landmark case that can now be referred to whenever a company is accused of passing off its brand as that of a more successful competitor. Had Bill Pugh not been a perfectionist, it may never have come to pass.
There is evidence to suggest that Pugh’s lemon had itself been preceded by a similar plastic container emanating from Italy. Therefore it’s quite possible that the law-defining plastic lemon may yet have another day in court, and go on to define another nation’s laws.
A Spanish ship containing oranges is battered by a North Sea storm
Crossing the Channel to the Continent, one of the many differences to Blighty that the doughty British traveller will notice – aside from how cheery everyone looks – is in the meaning of the term ‘marmalade’. Pick up a jar with that word on the label in a French épicerie, for example, and it will not contain an orange, jelly-like substance, flecked with pieces of peel, but something more akin to a fruit paste, and probably one that will not have any connection with an orange at all.
Scurry down to a grocer’s in Portugal and there is likely to be more scratching of heads and fruitless repetitions of the word because their marmelada – from which the English word ‘marmalade’ is derived – is specifically a quince paste (marmelo being the Portuguese for quince). The story is the same on other parts of the Continent. In order to secure a jar of the orange preserve that sweetens the toast of Britons from Aberdeen to Zennor, the wanderer will have to ask specifically for marmelade d’oranges in France and marmellata di arance amare (‘marmalade of bitter oranges’) in Italy.
Back in the late Middle Ages, variations of the term ‘marmalade’ were used throughout Europe to describe all kinds of fruit pastes. Though quinces were the standard ingredient, many other fruits were turned into a marmalade, mixed with some combination of honey, sugar and spices. At this time, marmalade was a catch-all term that covered everything from chunks of fruit preserved in a syrup to a fully fledged fruit paste, and could include honey, spices, rose water or even musk and ambergris. The English had their own variation, known as ‘chardequince’, which was rather viscous and employed cinnamon and other spices.
Even later English marmalades would barely be recognisable to modern Britons. A recipe for ‘Marmelet of Oranges’ is included in a handwritten book found in Cheshire and dating from about 1677. The author, Eliza Cholmondeley, sets out instructions for a preserve that uses only bitter oranges and sugar, and results in a sweet fruit paste.
It’s not until the 18th century that one finds something resembling the translucent jelly-like substance that goes by the name marmalade today. Mary Kettilby’s comprehensive tome A Collection of Above Three Hundred Receipts in Cookery, Physick and Surgery, published around 1714, contains a marmalade recipe that includes lemon juice and instructs cooks to boil the mixture ‘until it will jelly’. Even so, such delicacies were too expensive to become popular and so tended to be the preserve of the wealthy.
The classic British marmalade would not have taken over the nation’s breakfast tables had it not been for a storm at sea. One day, in the 18th century, a ship carrying Seville oranges from Spain began to make heavy weather of it as the winds whipped up the shallow waters of the North Sea. Although probably bound for Leith, from where its cargo could be carted to markets in Edinburgh, the captain decided to avoid the Firth of Forth and put in at the port of Dundee. Rather than have his Seville oranges rot in their crates as he waited for a favourable turn in the weather, the captain decided to cut his losses and sell them off cheaply where he was. He just happened to have chosen the city where one of the inhabitants was a woman who would change the face of the British breakfast: Janet Keiller.
It’s at this point that things begin to get a little cloudy. According to C. Anne Wilson’s excellent The Book of Marmalade, there are two possible Janet Keillers of Dundee who might have been that woman. One (Janet Pierson) is known to have married a James Keiller in 1700. Another, Janet Matthewson, married John Keiller, who was a descendent of the first couple. To confuse things further, Janet and John had a son called James, thus producing a second James Keiller. Both husbands appear to have run a grocer’s shop in the city, possibly one that was passed down through the generations. Unfortunately, the one key fact
that could settle the argument – the year in which the ship got caught in the storm – is not known. For what it’s worth, the Keiller Company’s own history plumps for the later Janet and, as we shall see, she does seem the more likely one.
What we can be more certain of is that the husband of one of the Janets, a man with an eye for a bargain, caught wind of the sale. He availed himself of a good quantity of the oranges, taking some of them home to his wife. Unlike the normal run of oranges, the Seville orange has a bitter taste and is not the sort of fruit that was likely to fly off the shelves of the Keillers’ shop. This left husband and wife with something of a problem.
Janet Keiller decided that the best thing to do in these circumstances would be to make the oranges into marmalade, which would at least preserve them. In order to spare herself the wearisome task of pounding the oranges down to a pulp, she cut the peel into chips before boiling it up with sugar and lemon juice. Janet’s ‘Dundee Orange Marmalade’ proved very popular with customers, and soon fresh supplies of Seville oranges were being ordered from Spain.
In due course – in 1797, to be precise – the later Janet’s boy set up the firm James Keiller and Son in order to sell the marmalade on a larger scale. The Keillers were the first owners of a marmalade factory, cooking up the sweetmeat in large copper pans and selling it at prices that made it accessible to working people for the very first time. Copycat operations sprang up in Dundee, adopting Janet Keiller’s ‘chip-cut’ gelatinous style of marmalade, and the Scottish city became the marmalade capital of Britain. Sales boomed in the first half of the 19th century.
Although it cannot be said that Janet Keiller invented marmalade, the accidental influx of Seville oranges that wind-tossed day in Dundee influenced her decision to make the distinctive chip-cut style that was to prove so popular. The massive operation her son James set up – the first time marmalade was ever made on such a scale – meant that there were sufficient quantities for it to become a staple of the British breakfast, spreading itself first across Scotland, then across Britain, and finally across the largest empire the world had ever seen.
