Hold the Mayo

How did Independence Day became a mayonnaise holiday? Our Founding Fathers cross a sea and create a new country and all we can come up with some egg yolks and oil?

Potato salad, macaroni salad, and cole slaw—dripping in ooey gooeyness—all at the same table? We aren’t in The Fifties anymore. Poodle skirts and bouffant hairdos are long gone. Children are secured in car seats, not propped in the back of a station wagon. We recycle instead of littering. No one can smoke at their desks any longer. They have to go outside and freeze. But are we still cooking like our grandmothers.

Let’s think about this for a minute. What was the motivation for bringing multiple mayonnaise-based salads out into the sun for a few hours in July? I’m thinking it was a woman in a very unhappy marriage hoping a foodborne illness might solve the situation. Divorce was a taboo, but salmonella poisoning was simply a tragedy.

My beef, however, isn’t about food safety. It’s about bargains. I’m looking to eat foods that don’t take a half a day to work off on a treadmill. Ever see a calories burned readout of 104 calories after twenty minutes of working out like a rodent on a hamster wheel? That means I burned a fudgsicle, not a cheeseburger.

A half cup of any of our favorite Fourth of July mayonnaise-based salads is equivalent to about a half a day's worth of calories. If I have a serving of all three, I’ve eaten a day and a half worth of food, without even tasting a hamburger, hot dog, or potato chips.

If I am going to use that may calories in one sitting, I’m thinking it ends with raspberry crème brûlée at a five star restaurant, not Aunt Nora’s potato salad on a paper plate at a picnic table.

It took a little effort to expand my barbeque repertoire, but I like looking for recipes in cookbooks, magazines, and on the Internet. It was not without backlash. The first holiday I had at which I didn’t serve chips and onion dip my brother left to go to a convenience store to buy some.

Nowadays, I roast and grill vegetables, make potato, macaroni, and carrot slaw with vinaigrettes for barbeques. Last summer, I discovered marinated vegetable salads, which are quick and easy to make with reduced fat and keep well for hours in warm weather. The only person I make a traditional creamy potato salad for is my dear husband of too many years.