Camilo José Cela and mahonnaise sauce

Due to its interest, we reproduce the gastronomy article about our mahonnaise sauce published by Ana Vega Pérez de Arlucea, today March 21, 2025 in the digital newspaper https://www.leonoticias.com which has an important gastronomy section.

Ana Vega Pérez de Arlucea/Leonoticias ?- In 1971, the Mahón City Council and the Menorca Tourism Promoters Association organized the first (and only, as far as I know) International Mahonnaise Week. Tired of reading "mayonnaise" with a French "y" on restaurant menus or supermarket shelves, the Menorcans had devised a promotional strategy that would serve to make it clear once and for all that the famous egg and oil emulsion was born in Mahón and not Mayenne. It didn't work out so well. First, they contacted numerous manufacturers to try to convince them to replace the Greek y on their labels with an intercalated h. When that didn't work, they devised an ambitious event that, in theory, should have served as an international platform to proclaim the sauce's "Menorcanness" to the four winds. They invited directors of distinguished hotel management schools, editors of important gastronomic magazines, renowned foreign chefs—including the head chef of the United Nations!—and, of course, a long list of national authorities, as well as several names from the world of literature with a proven interest in cooking. It was rumored that Josep Pla, Juan Perucho, Álvaro Cunqueiro, Camilo José Cela, Néstor Luján, and Francisco Moreno, Count of the Andes and food critic for the newspaper ABC under the pseudonym "Savarin," would attend the Mayonnaise event.

None of them were able to attend, and International Mahonnaise Week, held from October 7 to 13, 1971, was rather lackluster. Perhaps that's why Cela, feeling indebted to the Menorcan revival of this universal sauce, published just a month later—on November 11—an op-ed in the newspaper La Vanguardia entitled "Cooking and Philology: More on Mahonnaise Sauce." The future Nobel Prize winner for Literature had been living in Mallorca since 1954 and also had a keen personal interest in food, so what better way for him than to become a champion of Balearic gastronomy and, in the process, set a precedent by boasting of his profound literary knowledge.

Remember last week's article about the confusion caused by an innocent poem in the history of Mahonnaise? Well, it turns out Cela had also given a lot of thought to those verses attributed to a certain 17th-century Lancelot. "I've been asking myself questions about mahonnaise sauce for several years now, exactly twenty-three, although for long periods I didn't even touch the folder where I kept the notes I was taking," the Galician writer said. "Was it brought to France from Mahón by the Duke of Richelieu? Who was Lancelot? Is the little poem "Sauce Mayonnaise" by Lancelot? Who, if not, was its author? When were those verses written? Is it valid to call mayonnaise sauce? Which of the two forms should prevail? I'm a patient and stubborn man, and I think I've found something out in this regard."

Don Camilo's salsa bug had been awakened in 1948 thanks to Josep Pla and his defense of the French origin of mahonnaise with a "y" in the magazine Destino. All of Pla's arguments were based on the supposed antiquity of the Lancelot poem, so Cela launched into a rebuttal by demonstrating that the contentious rubble dated back to the late 19th century. Committed to the mission, he expanded his philological-culinary research with a new, much longer article that was published in 1972 in the Revista de Menorca and in Papeles de Son Armadans, and even revived the topic in 1998 for ABC. By then, he had been on the trail of mahonesil for 50 years and had found the link between the French capture of Menorca in 1756 and a native sauce. According to him, it could be documented that the Duke of Richelieu, in command of that military operation, had named the recipe "mahonnaise" simply by revealing a piece of paper that he had kept hidden out of modesty. «In the attic of a Menorcan family, if the damp hasn't erased it or if the mice haven't ended up eating it, there is a letter from the Duke, the man who loved the table and women so much that, in his eighties, and having never turned his nose up at the tablecloth or the sheet, he remarried for the third time. The letter was addressed to that loving great-grandmother who is never lacking in the best families, and, in the paragraph that interests us, it read as follows: "...and in case it were possible for me to forget you, madam, that tender sauce with which you so often made my palate happy will take care of making me remember you, and from this moment on I tell you that, since I cannot give it your name, I will call it mahonnaise." Cela said that defending the virtue of a very distant ancestor was the only thing that prevented that letter from seeing the light of day, but I can tell you that this love letter exists and has been one of the traces that today allow us to corroborate, loud and clear, that mahonnaise is from Mahón. TI'll tell you more next week.