Mayo & Menstruation
The things people come up with...
I’m meeting my family up in Carmel Valley where, if it were artichoke season, we’d be going hog wild on them. (Central Californians pronounce them arty-choke. Anyone else?) We dip the leaves in mayo, and don’t worry about the reproductive abilities of the person who made it. -Katherine
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Mayo and Menstruation
By Emily Monaco
French people, by and large, do not balk at the idea of making mayonnaise from scratch, with nothing more than a fork and a bit of patience. But once a month, some women will pass the fourchette to someone else: A pervasive myth in France claims that someone who's menstruating is doomed to have her mayo split.
The idea is widespread in France, according to Elise Thiébaut, author of '“Ceci est mon sang,” a book that attempts to de-stigmatize menstruation. For her, this superstition is but one of many, including the claim that a menstruating woman who walks into a wine cellar will cause the wine to turn, or a myth that menstrual blood kills leeches (and that, she says, led to French women running commando through cabbage fields well into the 1960s).
The late anthropologist Alain Testart highlighted the “well-known” superstition in his “L’amazone et la cuisinière, anthropologie de la division sexuelle du travail.”
“You can believe it or not believe it,” he wrote, noting that while some pooh-pooh the legend, others claim to have witnessed events where “the mere presence of an indisposed woman had sometimes ‘turned’ mayonnaise.”
Ruba Khoury, the Palestinian-born chef-owner of Paris’ Dirty Lemon, first encountered the myth working as a chef de partie under a head chef and sous chef – both white, male, and French – who, she recounts, would tell her, “You better not have your period or else you won't be able to monter the mayonnaise right."
“I did not grow up with this myth, only have encountered it in France,” she says. “I would not be surprised if it originated here.”
The connection between eggs and menstruation is obvious, and to make the leap to preclude women from handling eggs while menstruating, ovulating, or even pregnant may make a certain old-timey sense … but it’s certainly scientifically unfounded.
“There’s this sort of magical contradiction,” says Thiébaut, “a link between the fact that they themselves are menstruating, and they’re touching eggs.”
Superstition aside, having one’s period of course has no real effect on whether one can scramble eggs, poach them, or, indeed, whisk them into a mayonnaise.
“I think it’s a total wives’ tale and sexist,” says Khoury, who notes that the mere evocation of the legend in her previous professional kitchens nevertheless occasionally made it come true – albeit not for the reasons her chefs claimed.
“When they would say it to me, it would mess me up and I wouldn’t be able to make a mayonnaise right!” she says. “And that stupid myth has stayed with me even till this day.”
“Sometimes with these beliefs, there are foundations,” says Thiébaut. “But the fact of making or ruining a mayonnaise depends only on temperature.” 🩸
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This newsletter is edited by Katherine Spiers, host of the podcast Smart Mouth.
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