100 years of Duke's Mayonnaise: the South's favorite spread celebrates a century

[mahatmakanejeeves]

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100 years of Duke's Mayonnaise: the South's favorite spread celebrates a century

By ROBERT ZULLO • Richmond Times-Dispatch 18 hrs ago

{I'm out of free articles. I'll post the text later.}

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Duke's Mayonnaise

Duke's Mayonnaise is a condiment created by Mrs. Eugenia Duke at Duke's sandwich shop of Greenville, South Carolina, in 1917. While it is the third-largest mayonnaise brand in the United States (behind Hellmann's and Kraft), its popularity is largely limited to the south. It is used in regional favorites such as tomato sandwiches, cole slaw, and potato salad. Duke's Mayonnaise contains more egg yolks than other mayonnaise products and no added sugar, giving it a tangy flavor.

C.F. Sauer Company purchased the Duke's Products in 1929.

In 2017, the South Carolina legislature recognized the centennial of Duke's.

Ingredients list

Soybean oil, eggs, water, distilled and cider vinegar, salt, oleoresin paprika, natural flavors, calcium disodium EDTA added to protect flavor.

Duke’s Mayonnaise: The Southern spread with a cult following

By Emily Wallace November 5, 2013

I showed up at the gate of the C.F. Sauer Co. in Richmond this past summer pronouncing myself something of a mayonnaise scholar: “I wrote my master’s thesis on pimento cheese,” I told Erin Hatcher, who oversees the company’s Duke’s Mayonnaise label. As any Southerner knows, mayonnaise is perhaps pimento cheese’s most important ingredient; after all, it holds it all together.

But Hatcher almost blew my cover of detached academic when she began to tell me about Duke’s legions of dedicated fans. They send an endless stream of fan mail, she explained, including letters, recipes, concepts for television commercials and paintings. “Paintings of a jar with a sandwich,” she told me, arching her eyebrows. “A lot.”

“Paintings?” I can be heard saying on a recording of our conversation. Though in a mayonnaise factory, I must have turned three shades of ketchup red: I myself had recently penned a small drawing of the yellow-lidded Duke’s jar. But paintings, it turns out, are fairly tame when it comes to Duke’s fandom. “You just would not believe,” Hatcher told me before launching into what one might call a Duke’s fan hall of fame.

There was the man on his hospital death bed who asked for a tomato sandwich made with Duke’s. There was the mother of the bride who, after the company made its switch from glass to plastic containers around 2005, demanded four glass jars with labels intact to use as centerpieces at her daughter’s wedding. And there was the elderly woman from North Carolina. She wrote in hopes of obtaining just three glass jars, saying she’d like to be cremated and have her ashes placed in the containers for her three daughters. Hatcher assured me that she followed through on that request.
....

Wallace is a writer and illustrator based in Durham, N.C. She is also an editor for the quarterly Southern Cultures quarterly at UNC-Chapel Hill. This piece is an edited version of a presentation she gave at the Southern Foodways Alliance symposium in October. She can be reached through her Web site, eewallace.com.

[Docreed2003]

1. My favorite mayo!!

[mahatmakanejeeves]

2. A 16-ounce jar still has 16 ounces of mayonnaise, unlike one brand I can think of. NT

[Docreed2003]

7. And it tastes better than any alternative

I’m not picky about much, but I insist on Duke’s in our house!

[DashOneBravo]

3. That's all I use

I used it at Christmas for spinach dip and for the deviled eggs.

[dweller]

4. ahh... no sugar added

I've become 1 of those curmudgeon shoppers reading the ingreds looking for sugar, or worse yet corn syrup high fructose 😖 in products before I purchase... major clue it has no flavor, so has been sweetened to make it palatable

have enjoyed dukes for decades, they also make the 2nd best tartar sauce, mine being 1st 😁

[left-of-center2012]

5. I never heard of Duke's until a couple months ago

Someone in a non-DU forum said it was her favorite.
One day I saw a jar at Walmart and bought it.
It quickly became my favorite.

I've not seen it since at any grocery here in Albuquerque where I shop.

[NightWatcher]

6. Slathered that on my turkey prior to popping it in the oven yesterday.

Imagine you're putting sunscreen on an Irish person, that's how much you use. Then a light salting and peppering and it's ready for the oven.