Maraschino
A bitter-sweet liqueur made at Zara from the kernel of the Marasca cherry or gean of Dalmatia. The word implies bitterness; but the liqueur is made so sweet that women take to it as flies to honey and as moths to candles. It is a curious fact in natural history that the fair sex prefer a sweet liqueur to the finest wine; and they have such a tendency to Maraschino, that Mr. Hayward has proposed that whereas the toast most honoured among men is Wine and Women, they should adopt as their own return toast-Men and Maraschino. The French have produced several variations of the true Maraschino of Zara, and notably one which they call Marasquin de pêches. The true Maraschino of Zara is made with but a small quantity of peach kernels. It is made from a small black gean, which is fermented first with honey, then with the leaves and kernels of the fruit, and is at last distilled and sweetened with sugar.
MARINADE is a brine, souse or pickle, used sometimes to prepare fish, flesh or fowl for the fire; sometimes to preserve them after they have left it. A marinade is either cooked or raw; but it is not usual for the books to give Matelote any account of the raw ones. The two following, which are very simple, may be mentioned because they are of frequent use in Horlys-that is, fillets of chicken, sole, or game, which are dipped in batter and fried after enduring two hours of the pickle.
Raw Marinade.-No. 1. A branch of parsley and half an onion, chopped and mixed with pepper and salt into the juice of a lemon. No. 2. A faggot of sweet-herbs and an onion chopped and mixed with pepper and salt into oil and vinegar.
Cooked Marinade. A faggot of sweet-herbs, an onion, a shalot, a clove of garlic, a carrot, and four ounces of bacon, chopped together first, then fried with an ounce of butter, then salted and peppered, and boiled for a minute or two in a pint of liquid, half water, half vinegar.
MARMALADE is a word which we have come to use very much as the French say Rosbif de mouton and Rosbif d'agneau. It means a confection of quince-from the Portuguese marmólo, a quince. But we say apple marmalade and orange marmalade. MATELOTE is a stew of fresh-water fish. Take different kinds-carp, eel, pike, tench, perch, and cut them up; but it must be remembered that some of these fish, as the eel and the pike, may require some previous cooking to put them on the same level with the others. Put the pieces into a stewpan with two sliced onions, a faggot of sweetherbs, two cloves of garlic crushed, two cloves, pepper and salt. Moisten all so as to be well covered with a liquor composed of red wine two-thirds and broth one-third. Cook it on a brisk fire for twenty minutes; then pass the liquor through a tammy and keep the fish hot in the pan. In the meantime the Relish or Ragout of the fish will have been got ready as follows. Put half a pound of butter into a saucepan, and toss in it till they take a fine Matelote colour two dozen small onions; take out the onions, and put in their place two good spoonfuls of flour, which is to be worked into a roux. Add to this the strained liquor of the fish, the little onions, and a like quantity of mushrooms. Let the cooking go on till onions and mushrooms are sufficiently done; and then reduce the sauce on a quick fire and remove the grease from it. Lastly, make a pyramid of the fish upon a dish, pour the sauce over it, and garnish it with crayfish and fried crusts of bread. The sauce thus prepared, with the garnish of onions, mushrooms, crayfish and crusts, is known as the Matelote Relish or Ragout. White Matelote. This is commonly called in France the Matelote Vierge; and it must not be mistaken for the Normandy Matelote, which is also white. It is most frequently used for eel, but it is good also for other fish. Cut the eel into lengths of two or three inches, and set them to boil for four or five minutes in salt and water, together with two tablespoonfuls of vinegar. This preliminary step, though necessary for eel, is not so for other fish. Melt in a saucepan a piece of butter with a spoonful of flour; dilute it with half white wine (French) and half broth, and add to it pepper, salt, and a faggot of sweet-herbs. Place the fish in it with a number of small onions and mushrooms, and let it cook for twenty or twenty-five minutes. When cooked, remove the fish, onions, mushrooms and faggot, thicken the sauce with yolk of egg, finish it with lemonjuice, and strain it over the fish, which will also be garnished with the onions and mushrooms and with fried crusts of bread. In effect this sauce is but a variety of the white-wine sauce prescribed hereafter for sole.
Normandy Matelote. - This is the grand white Matelote -a magnificent dish, but unhappily only possible during the months when oysters and mussels are in season. It is excellent for a brill or a chicken turbot ; but it was first of all invented for the benefit of a large sole, and the Mayonnaise original receipt for it will be found under the title of Sole à la Normande.
MAYONNAISE is nothing else than the ordinary French salad mixture of oil, vinegar, pepper and salt, with the addition of raw yolks of eggs; but its excellence depends on the mode of working it up, which is very elaborate. If properly handled, a raw yolk will incorporate into a thick cream no less than a quart of oil. To make a good Mayonnaise it is enough that two raw yolks should incorporate in this way a tumblerful of olive oil and a small wineglassful of tarragon vinegar or of lemon-juice. The result will be that those who object to oil will, if it be good, forget that it is there, and those who object to raw eggs will detect no trace of their rawness. The yolks, white pepper and salt are first worked smooth with a wooden spoon in a bowl; a few drops of oil and a few of vinegar are added, and the spoon goes to work again; again a few drops, and the spoon is plied with great patience; and so on till the mixture thickens and the whole of the oil and vinegar is absorbed. It is a long, tedious process of stirring, although as it goes on the oil may be added in larger and larger quantities. If great care is not taken the mixture will decompose in the very act of working it smooth; sometimes in the heat of summer it is necessary to manipulate it, holding the bowl on ice. This is the sauce in its simplicity, and so made it ought to be perfect.
Green Mayonnaise. For ordinary purposes a simple receipt will suffice-namely, this: Add to the Mayonnaise after it is finished a quantity of chopped ravigote. But a more perfect receipt is as follows :- Take a good faggot of ravigote, and blanch it for five or six minutes in boiling water and salt. Then take it out to get cold, and wipe it dry. Pound it in a mortar with a spoonful of Mayonnaise, and pass it through a tammy. The Lady Mayonnaise Mix this with the Mayonnaise already prepared, and if the colour is too pale, add a little spinach-green.
Mayonnaise of Jelly. - There are no eggs in this, but aspic or savoury jelly instead. Melt half a tumblerful of jelly, and when it is cold but not yet firm, add to it a wineglassful of olive oil, a tablespoonful of tarragon vinegar, some salt and white pepper. Place the bowl if possible upon ice or very cold water, and whip it with a wire whisk till the sauce thickens and whitens. A little lemon-juice added will improve its whiteness. For many people this is enough; but those who rejoice in oil will go on adding it in the full proportion required for the Mayonnaise made with eggs. Those also who like the ravigote will add it as in the Green Mayonnaise. The sauce is smoothest when it is not made until the last moment. It has a great advantage over the Mayonnaise made with eggs that it can be made very quickly in any quantity, and that it does not decompose if care is taken to keep it cold. There are some also who consider this Mayonnaise more delicate in taste than that made with eggs.
These three receipts for Mayonnaise, a fourth receipt for Remoulade, which is made with hard-boiled yolks, and a fifth for Tartar sauce, which is the bedevilment of either Mayonnaise or Remoulade, are all that it is necessary to know for practical purposes. But there is much more to be said as to the history of the Mayonnaise, and I proceed to show that La Mayonnaise was a lady.
The Lady Mayonnaise.—We need lay no stress on the fact to begin with that the word Mayonnaise is more often used as a noun than as an adjective. Rightly or wrongly, it is used sometimes as an adjective; for we say Sauce Mayonnaise just as people sometimes also say Sauce Béchamel. Rightly or wrongly, too, the word is still more often used as a substantive, as when we say a Mayonnaise; The Lady Mayonnaise and there is no other name of a sauce so frequently thus used save those which, like Béchamel, are substantives confessed. This, however, is so deceptive that at starting we must not rely upon it. Many a time it happens that an adjective is for shortness turned into a substantive. But if it can be proved independently that the word is a noun, the name for a lady, and not an adjective, then here we have an important corroborative fact to return to: that whereas most other French sauces have names indicated by adjectives-Sauce Italienne, Espagnole-this one has a name which is much more often used as a substantive. The name is a great puzzle to the French themselves. Why Mayonnaise? What can be the meaning of it?
The last syllable (nearly always in French representing the Latin termination -ensis) would seem to imply that it is an adjective of place-as Français or Française, from France, Marseillais or Marseillaise, from Marseilles. But there is no such place as Mayonne, and there lies the difficulty. In the beginning of the century Grimod de la Reynière suggested that there was some corruption in the word, and that it ought to be Bayonnaise, after the town of Bayonne on the Spanish frontier. His suggestion was deemed so important that the sauce is so named in a number of approved dictionaries, and there are purists to this day who always mention it as Bayonnaise. Grimod, however, also pointed out another solution. The word might be Mahonnaise, in honour of Marshal Richelieu's achievement in capturing the great stronghold of Mahon in the island of Minorca. It was in attempting to relieve this fort, it may be remembered, that the English Admiral Byng made the failure for which he was shot" pour encourager les autres," as Voltaire says in Candide. But on the whole it was considered that this explanation was not so good as the other; and for the moment it was discarded. Then came Carême-a great cook, but not much of a linguist, and a very conceited man, with an egotistical, The Lady Mayonnaise arrogant style. He was very angry with Grimod for daring to say that the language of the kitchen is not remarkable for its purity. It is in the great kitchens, he said, " c'est là que les puristes resident :" a very startling statement to those who are aware that no sets of terms in either the French or the English language are so corrupt and obscure as those connected with food.
Be that as it may, Carême declared loudly that with regard to this particular word it was the men of letters squabbling over the comparative merits of Mayonnaise, Bayonnaise, and Mahonnaise, who were corrupt and ignorant; that the cooks knew better-they were the true guides to pronunciation-and with them the genuine word was Magnonnaise. He maintained that any one could see at a glance that the name was intended to suggest the difficult process of manipulating the sauce. It came from the verb manier, and referred to the continual maniement which is needed to produce it. Carême was not always of this opinion, for he has in one curious passage, in which he enumerates the list of dishes named after French localities, mentioned Magnonnaise among them, as if this sauce too were taken from the name of a place. There is no such place as Magnon, however, and no one with the instincts of a philologer could derive Magnonnaise from the verb manier which, to say no more, does not account for the introduction of the nat the commencement of the third syllable. The grammarians could only deride Carême's attempt at etymology, and they dismissed his theory on the spot as not worthy of notice.
These are discussions which belong to the first quarter of the century; and now that we have come to the last quarter it will be asked-What are the final opinions of French philologers, after fifty years of research which have thrown a flood of light on the sources of the French language? The leading dictionaries of the present day have no clear opinion to express upon the subject; they The Lady Mayonnaise resort to conjecture; and their conjecture is that the explanation which was least regarded in the beginning of the century may after all be right-Mahonnaise, in honour of the siege of Mahon. Littré and others give this now as the probable but not certain origin of the word. There is a great difficulty, however, in the way of accepting it-a difficulty which the lexicographers would have seen clearly if they had not thought it beneath them to pay much attention to the very curious literature of the French kitchen. The capture of Mahon was effected in 1726, and there is no other known instance at that period, or for long after it, of a dish or dainty being named after a victory. Dishes were named after the places where they were invented, the races who partook of them, or the great nobles who patronised them. It was not till the battle of Marengo-seventy-four years after the fall of Mahonthat the field of a great victory gave its name by a mere accident to a dish: the chicken à la Marengo. To guess, therefore, that Mahonnaise comes from the siege of Mahon is to antedate enormously a modern phantasy; and furthermore to assume an exceptional phraseology, when the analogy of à la Marengo would lead one to expect à la Mahon as the name for a sauce which does not properly belong to Mahon and has only an honorary connection with it.
What then is the true word-Mayonnaise, Bayonnaise, Magnonnaise, or Mahonnaise? I am about to maintain that the last of these spellings, now adopted by the chief authorities, is the most correct--that is, nearest to the original; but to suggest a different explanation for it. The fact is that though Carême made a great mistake in working out his explanation, he is entitled to more attention than he has received in his statement as to the tradition of the kitchen. He does not say absolutely, but he leaves it to be understood, that in his culinary circle the name of the sauce was everywhere supposed to bear special The Lady Mayonnaise reference to the mode of its manipulation. That is an important fact, and it gives a clue to the mystery if we follow it up. Carême, we have seen, fixes upon the verb manier not only as indicating the meaning of the word, but also as indicating its root. This is clearly wrong. But may there not be some other word?
In the old Provençal tongue, the dead language of the Troubadours, which contains the earliest literature of Modern Europe, which seemed at one time as if it would be the dominant speech of France, and which though finally displaced by the dialect of the North, by French, the language of the Trouvères, yet contributed to it very many words and forms of words, many that we know, but not a few doubtless that we never suspect, in this ancient tongue, which spread over Southern France and gave its name to Languedoc, there was a verb one of the forms of which was mahonner, and one of the meanings of which was to fatigue. The verb was spelt in many and extremely diverse ways-not only mahonner and majhonner, but mechaigner, mehagner, maganhar, mehenier, and others; it had also many and extremely diverse meanings, to strike, to kill, to wound, to mutilate, to box, to maltreat, as well as to worry and fatigue. If the reader is inclined to allow that the verb mahonner, still more majhonner from its spelling, has a fair surface claim to be deemed the original of Mahonnaise and Mayonnaise he may still kick at its meaning and ask how are we to get a salad mixture out of a verb meaning to fatigue? The process is very simple. One of the most common French phrases for mixing a salad is to fatigue it; and this phrase is so odd that in connection with it a tradition has always been preserved, and is known to most persons of any information, that it is of Provençal origin. The verb mahonner, as applied to the mixing of a salad, conveyed an image of that exaggerated and picturesque kind which we associate with slang or cant. I do not mean anything coarse or The Lady Mayonnaise vulgar--in this case quite the contrary; I mean only words which are lifted out of their natural sense into a special, figurative and technical meaning, and which have a peculiar currency on the lips of the initiated. Springing up in the dialect of the South, it would always be strange and sometimes incomprehensible to those who spoke the dialect of the North. For them for the French-it would be translated into fatiguer, and the two verbs mahonner and fatiguer would exist concurrently in French. The former at length dropped out of sight altogether, surviving only in the derivative Mahonnaise or Mayonnaise, with a vague tradition preserved in the kitchen down to the time of Carême that the name had reference to the manner of mixing or fatiguing the sauce.
The explanation, however, is not yet complete; there is a flaw in the evidence. How are we to account for the final syllable of Mahonnaise, which usually belongs to adjectives connected with place? and how are we to construct any likely adjective from the active verb Mahonner? In this case we must be prepared to accept any word which could by licence be twisted into anything like Mahonnaise, for the Provençal spelling is so loose and takes so wide a range (as will have been seen above in the second syllable of Mahonner, mechaigner, mehagner, maganhar, mehenier), that even a distant resemblance might satisfy us. But from an active verb mahonner there is no such adjective possible. The nearest thing we can create is a participial adjective mahonnant or mahonnante, or such a word as mahonnable; and these are nothing like what we want. The fact is that the word Mahonnaise is not an adjective at all, but a feminine substantive, applied to women. According to the laws of modern French spelling, it ought to be Mahonneur for the masculine, and Mahonneuse for the feminine-one who fatigues. So we have danseuse from danser, charmeuse from charmer, and the old word gouverneuse from The Lady Mayonnaise gouverner. About the spelling we need not trouble because of its extreme laxity; the Mahonneuse of modern French spelling might very easily be Mahonnaise in the old corrupt and diversified Provençal pronunciation; it will not confound any one who catches the analogy in Trouveur and Trouvère. The real difficulty is in the sense. Unable to make a likely adjective from the verb, we have made a feminine noun-and what have we gained? We have gained a noun which curiously and unexpectedly fits into what is more than a tradition like Carême's tradition of the kitchen-it is a historical fact. We have gained a sudden and undesigned coincidence which is one of the tests of truth. In the olden time a salad was mixed by pretty women, and they did it with their hands. This was so well understood that down at least to the time of Rousseau (Littré gives a quotation from the Nouvelle Héloise, vi. 2), the phrase retourner la salade avec les doigts was used to describe a woman as being still young and beautiful. "Dans le siècle dernier," are Littré's own words" les jeunes femmes retournaient la salade avec les doigts : cette locution a disparu avec l'usage lui-même." And this is the meaning of the feminine noun. A feminine adjective, if such could be found, would present no difficulties; it would necessarily be Sauce Mahonnaise. But if a likely adjective from the verb mahonner is impossible, and we have only a noun to fall back upon, why not Mahonneur-a man who fatigues the salad? It is Mahonneuse or Mahonnaise-a woman, because it was she in her youth and beauty who fatigued the sauce; it was she who with her fingers fatigued the salad.
If these considerations be well founded, the proper name for the sauce is not Sauce Mayonnaise, but Sauce à la Mayonnaise-or still more simply, La Mayonnaise. And we can now see why the word is more often used as a noun than as an adjective.
Meringues