I always wondered where the magic came from. The subject being my mother’s mashed-potato recipe, I just assumed it was love.
I have had mashed potatoes in a thousand “meat-and-threes,” spooned out by ladies in hairnets and orthopedic shoes, and in a thousand perfect bistros, dusted with parsley or Parmesan. None were as good as hers, conjured in her battered pot in the pines of Alabama.
I once asked her secret. “Just butter, milk, salt, and pepper,” she lied. I know she lied because I tried it, homesick, in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, other places. I almost lit Cambridge on fire, trying to create what that old woman had. But when I was clone, it was always, well, pedestrian.
Her potatoes were creamy, perfect, with real butter pooling in small lakes. Lumps were for tourists. Skins were for philistines. These, cliché or not, melted on your tongue, with just a little extra, a lingering taste of . . . what? I could duplicate everything but that.
Then, lurking just outside her kitchen one Thanksgiving, I saw. It was not some magic turnip, or some spell.
It was just a damn condiment.
After mashing, salting, peppering, and adding whole milk and what seemed a half-pound of butter, she opened the refrigerator and reached for a quart jar of mayonnaise.
She took one heaping spoonful, for about a gallon or so of mashed potatoes, and whipped it in, meticulously, so that there would be no more than a hint, that touch, on any fork. I eased back into the shadows, to leave her with her myth. I should have known: Only we put mayo in our mashed potatoes and mistake it for love.
This is a story of tragic romance. I love that condiment, love it the way Odysseus loved Penelope, Samson loved Delilah, Lancelot loved Guinevere. I know, as they all must have known, that this will not end well, but I am not ashamed.
. . . .
In the Great Depression, mayonnaise was more plentiful-and cheaper–in some pockets of the Appalachians than lard and other cooking oil. My mother fried chicken in it on a wood stove outside Rome, Ga., and if that is a rural myth, it is a first-rate one. Try that in mustard, and see where it gets you.
My wife, as a young girl in Memphis in the 1920s, I mean the 1970s, covered her head in a gooey helmet of mayonnaise as a hair conditioner. It might have had some slight effect on the luster of her hair, but she walked around for days smelling like egg salad. (I think that this is why she is a mustard person now, but she says no, that it was because her grandmother believed that mayonnaise should be left at room temperature, which indoors in Memphis in summer was about 125. “My mother told me, ‘Whatever you do, don’t eat the mayonnaise,’” she said. I guess fear will turn you off anything.)
When I was a boy, mothers used mayonnaise on burns, like petroleum jelly, and to cool sunburn, but never on bee stings, on which they used wet snuff. Women in my childhood used it to smother ticks,
especially when they were out of Dippity-Do. They suffocated head lice with it, sometimes holding it on with plastic wrap or a crown of tin foil.
But mostly, we just ate it. We are it in creamy coleslaws and mountains of potato salad, and daubed on top of gelatin molds at Morrison’s Cafeteria.
We spread it on white bread, because it was the only sliced bread we knew, and made sandwiches from sliced tomatoes, salt, and pepper. Or we layered on sliced banana. To this day, I think that sandwich, with a handful of Golden Flake barbecue potato chips and a glass of milk, is pretty fine living and have it every chance I get, which means when my wife is at work.
Without it, we would have no BLTS, no pimento cheese, no deviled eggs. Chicken salad, shrimp salad, crab salad, lobster rolls, all would lie sadly on their plates, naked and forlorn.
“My Mayonnaise Addiction,” by Rick Bragg, originally published by Gourmet Live (http://live.gourmet.com) and published in “The Last Word,” The Week, December 17, 2010.
