Curried Mayo

I learnt how to make Mayonnaise long before I opened my first restaurant, watching my mother and sisters use two forks held back to back to whip the egg yolks, vinegar and oil into a beautiful, silky sauce. This was long before electric whisks were introduced to North Africa. It was a painstaking exercise that took at least fifteen minutes and usually gave them a dead arm but the resulting Mayonnaise was delicious and my mother used it in many pasta and rice dishes and salads.
When we opened Krimo’s in 1985, I decided to make it fresh and ended up whisking a few pints every week. It was essential for starters such as prawn cocktail by adding a dash of ketchup, a drop of dry white wine and a pinch of paprika. In the early days, at lunch, I served a simple starter which my mother often made. It was a salad called Egg Mimosa and was made with a hard-boiled egg, cut in half, the whites filled with Mayonnaise and the yokes grated all over. Training my apprentices to make Mayonnaise was like rocket science as many of them curdled it after adding too much oil in one go, but once they learnt there was no stopping them.
One fateful December day in 1988, our little production was forced to a sudden halt. Edwina Currie, a colourful junior health minister, sparked outrage by claiming that most eggs were infected with Salmonella. Her political ambitions came to an end and so did the use of homemade Mayonnaise in restaurants. We were advised to start using the shop-bought variety as it was made using pasteurised eggs. Many of us will remember the “salad cream” taste of industrial Mayonnaise in the late Seventies and early Eighties. Although over the years, we got accustomed to buying the sauce for our restaurants, at home, I often make mine from scratch for personal use.
In 1989, as I planned the restaurant’s fourth-anniversary celebration on May 4th, and, as Karen’s 40th birthday happened to be just a few days earlier, I decided to use the occasion to give her a present she would never forget. I contacted the local newspaper informing them of our fourth year in business. Their photographer came to take a photo outside our front door. As it was a Saturday and the place was closed at lunch, Karen reluctantly got ready and came down to pose for the picture in front of Krimo’s. She turned around and caught sight of the new restaurant sign that I had erected the previous evening after she had gone to bed. She was creased with laughter. For her birthday, I had renamed the restaurant “Karen’s Restaurant for the Day” and changed anything that had my name on with hers, even our ice cream dessert, the Krimo’s Special. After she had recovered from the shock, she jokingly asked whether she could keep the evening’s takings seeing that the restaurant was hers for the day.
That evening, as service drew to an end, Karen was subjected to her ultimate nightmare. Unaware of her abhorrence of strippergrams, her brother John had arranged for a Tarzan-gram to wish her happy birthday. A strapping lad, dressed in a fake leopard skin loincloth came through the front door, screaming and beating his chest, picked Karen up over his shoulder and slipped back out of before she realised what was happening. I am not sure she has ever forgiven John.
For years, the 8ft. sign adorned our kitchen at home until it sadly ended up in the dump when we moved house, but the memory of that day still survives.