The first time I saw a completo, I thought the white layer on top was cream cheese. It was displayed in a shop window in Chile, topped with tomato, avocado, and what looked like a generous spread of something pale and creamy. I bought one and took a large bite. It was mayonnaise — applied in a thick, confident layer across the entire sandwich. I had never seen that much mayonnaise on a single piece of food. At the time, it felt excessive.

I filed it away as a Chilean thing and didn't think about it again until I moved to the Netherlands.

Patatje — Dutch fries, thicker and softer than what I was used to — arrive in a paper cone with a pile of mayonnaise sitting on top. Not a small packet. A pile. The first time I ordered them I stared at it for a moment. Fried potatoes already contain plenty of oil. Adding a thick oil-based sauce on top seemed redundant.

But Dutch people do not consider this optional. Mayonnaise is where you start. From there, choices branch out: patatje oorlog adds peanut sauce and chopped onions. Joppiesaus — a Dutch invention — blends mayonnaise with mild curry spices. Fritessaus, the sauce marketed specifically for fries, is a lighter, slightly sweeter mayonnaise. In one form or another, nearly every variation begins in the same place.

Chile, then the Netherlands. I started paying closer attention.

When I think of mayonnaise from childhood, I think of sarada (사라다) — a word borrowed from "salad," filtered through Japanese pronunciation. Growing up, I assumed sarada simply meant salad. But the version at family gatherings looked nothing like what I understood salad to be. It was creamy and heavy, full of apples, persimmons, ham, peanuts, raisins, and potatoes, all folded together with mayonnaise. Not green. Not crunchy. Nothing light about it.

I never liked it. I would pick out the pieces of ham and leave the rest for my family.

It wasn't until I was in Hungary and ordered something called franciasaláta — French salad — that I recognized the pattern. What arrived was a bowl of diced potatoes, carrots, peas, and pickles bound with mayonnaise. It looked exactly like the sarada I had grown up pushing to the side of my plate.

The same dish appears across Europe under different names. Ensaladilla rusa in Spain. Insalata russa in Italy. In Russia, simply Olivier salad — named for the Belgian chef who created an elaborate version of it in nineteenth-century Moscow. As the recipe traveled, the expensive ingredients disappeared. What remained was the structure: chopped vegetables, mayonnaise, a different name in every country. French in Hungary. Russian in Spain. A salad in Korea, dressed as something it wasn't.

The same bowl, moving across borders under borrowed identities.

I am still not a fan of mayonnaise. But somewhere along the way, living in a country that puts it on everything, I stopped finding it strange. I began noticing it in places I hadn't expected — including in Korean cooking I had eaten my whole life without registering it. Ojingeochae muchim (오징어채 무침), dried shredded squid tossed with gochujang, often has a small amount of mayonnaise worked into it. It softens the texture and smooths the sharp edges of the seasoning. You don't taste it. You notice when it's missing.

That might be the most accurate thing I can say about mayonnaise: you don't always know it's there until it isn't. In Chile, in the Netherlands, in a bowl of sarada I spent years avoiding — it was present long before I started paying attention.