Dialogue: Homemade mayonnaise is really something to die for

By JOE BENNETT

If you had seven minutes to live, how would you fill them? Would you make peace with your maker, perhaps, or just make a cup of tea and look at the sky, or even make love - though that would leave the problem of the other six minutes?

Me, I'd make mayonnaise.

Delia Smith, the celebrated cook, makes mayonnaise in seven minutes flat.

She's timed herself, she says, with a stopwatch. Well, everyone finds their own way of wringing pleasure from the world.

The supermarket shelves abound in ersatz mayonnaise, relying for their sales on Hollywood endorsements or an advertising budget equal to the GDP of Poland.

But supermarket mayonnaise resembles the authentic stuff as I resemble Paul Newman.

Authentic mayonnaise has the consistency of shaving cream. It blobs, and each blob rises to a tip that slumps.

The taste, however, is harder to define, indeed all taste is tough to do in words as the wine wallahs found out long ago.

They tell us that a chardonnay has hints of passionfruit, but ask them to describe the taste of passionfruit and they'll be mute. They only thing for sure is that it doesn't taste like wine.

The other week I was told by a refreshingly frank and apparently knowledgeable master of plonk that the tongue is not a very discriminating instrument. It can distinguish only between sweet and sour, and salt and whatever is the opposite of salt (which apparently isn't pepper).

He said that all other tasting is done by the sense of smell, which is why when you are ravaged by a cold all food tastes of phlegm.

The taste of mayonnaise is especially elusive. It's as subtle as good flattery. At its best it tastes exquisitely of almost nothing. It's self-effacing, drawing attention to the brasher foods it complements.

The nearest I can come to it are words from Katherine Mansfield on a similar foodstuff. "Jose and Laura were licking their fingers," wrote Mansfield in The Garden Party, "with that absorbed inward look that only comes from whipped cream."

This week I bought some flakes of that crabstick stuff that's fashioned from reconstituted bits of fish then decorated with a reddish tinge and given an authentic-sounding Japanese name, and when I brought it home and laid it on the kitchen bench I thought I heard a noise. I bent down close and caught the crabstick crying out for mayonnaise.

I knew that mayonnaise had eggs in it but that was all I knew. I hauled Delia from the shelves. It was nice to find a recipe requiring things I didn't have to go and buy. Eggs I had in abundance, plus oil and salt and pepper.

Delia also called for mustard powder but that was clearly dispensable because (a) no mayonnaise I've met has tasted of mustard, (b) the quantity required was minute and (c) I didn't have any.

Delia told me first to separate an egg yolk. I'd seen chefs do that on television. Television eggs, of course, are different - chefs crack them one-handed and never have to fish for errant bits of shell - but I took my egg and cracked it and slid the yolk from half-shell to half-shell until the white fell away to a brace of dogs who stood below with jaws agape like giant furry nestlings.

My isolated yolk was the colour of that middle traffic light whose purpose I have never understood.

Then, said Delia, holding the electric beater in one hand and the bottle of oil in the other, add a single drop of oil and beat it in. I did as I was bid, holding the bowl still with my third hand that Delia had forgotten.

Then another drop of oil, and another and another, beating all the while like an old-fashioned schoolmaster. To my surprise, and just as Delia said it would, the mixture suddenly thickened and resembled mayonnaise.

And at that point, said Delia, I'd passed the time of danger and could add a slug of oil. I added a slug of oil. The mixture turned to sludge.

Not to worry, said Delia. Feed the dogs another egg white and add the sludge to the new yolk drop by drop until it thickens again. I did as bid and watched it thicken, then added a slug of oil.

For the next egg I had to go out to the henhouse, but by now I had learned caution. Slugs were out and dribbles in. In time I had a bowl of three-egg mayonnaise as rich as Rupert Murdoch, and the crabstick sandwich that it featured in was, as they say, to die for.

And had I had seven minutes to live I would have died for it about an hour before I got to eat it.