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Jenny Maxwell

writer, editor

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From Duke's to Duchess

I learned about Eugenia Duke, the woman behind the mayonnaise, while working on a WWI documentary last year.  No one seemed to know what happened to this entrepreneur after she left South Carolina.  So, I was excited to read new information this morning about Mrs. Duke.  

 Allison Askins, The State’s food editor, has more of her story here.  

I am fascinated by Eugenia Duke, who looks so grand and intimidating in her publicity photo.  Thanks to Furman professor Judy Bainbridge, I learned that Mrs. Duke was the rare woman to have a number listed under her own name in the Greenville phone book in 1918.  That she made sandwiches by the hundreds out of her kitchen.  And that she did quite well, thank you very much, at a time when almost no women were in business unless they’d inherited the role from a father or husband.

Mrs. Duke sold her sandwich company (Duke Sandwich Company, yes, as in the one on Forest Drive) and then sold her mayonnaise recipe to the C.F. Sauer Company.  They still make her recipe today, at a factory in Mauldin.

From Askins’s story, I learned that Mrs. Duke started another sandwich company in Oakland, CA, to feed WWII soldiers—the Duchess Sandwich Co.  I googled that and found this photo.  It’s quite a step up from the home kitchen operation she ran during WWI.

PS:  If you google “Duchess Sandwich” you also find some pretty odd society party pics.