I love mayonnaise. With really good, really fresh multigrain bread and mayonnaise, any kind of sandwich can be thrillingly good. You can’t have a decent potato salad or chicken salad or tuna salad without mayonnaise. And that pear salad — if the pear halves are icy cold and the lettuce is crisp and the shredded cheese is sharp cheddar and there is enough mayonnaise in the pear half so you have a little with each bite of pear and lettuce and cheese, it is remarkable.

I know some people don’t like mayonnaise, and sometimes I have trouble understanding that. Mayonnaise has been such a part of my life. I lived on candy when I was a little kid. During the day, I ate all the candy I could find, and then at dinner time I wouldn’t eat a bite. So full of candy, I just wanted to get back outside to play. I piled my food up to make it look like I had eaten a little, and I’d ask, “Can I go now?”

Unfortunately, much later, after I had my bath and was in my nightgown, I was starving. The food was put away, but my grandmother would have mercy and give me a piece of bread spread with mayonnaise so I didn’t have to go to bed ravenously hungry. Boy, was that bread and mayonnaise good!

Mayonnaise can be an amazing ingredient. You may see it in cake or muffin recipes instead of butter or oil. It coats the flour proteins so that they cannot grab water or each other to form gluten, and you will have an extraordinarily moist, very tender product. Actually, there are a lot of dishes with mayonnaise that people who don’t like mayonnaise may enjoy. Mayonnaise has enough egg to puff like a souffle when cooked. Those golden brown puffs — small rounds of bread with crab and mayonnaise cooked under the broiler — are magnificent.

The recipe given here is a great impress-your-friends spectacular, and you don’t even need to know how to cook to prepare it. My stepson fixed it in a toaster oven in his dorm and impressed the daylights out of his dates. You place a fish fillet — orange roughy, sole or flounder is good, mild, nonfishy-tasting fish — on a baking sheet. Stir together the mayonnaise and cheese, spread it on the fish and bake a few minutes. That’s it.

Shirley Corriher writes for The Los Angeles Times Syndicate, a division of Tribune Media Services.

ENTREE

FISH FILLETS UNDER DILL SOUFFLE

THIS MAYONNAISE-CHEESE TOPPING PUFFS TO A GOLDEN BROWN FOR AN ELEGANT DISH. USE SOLE, FLOUNDER, ORANGE ROUGHY OR ANY OTHER MILD-TASTING FISH. BROILED TOMATOES AND 4-MINUTE BROILED FRESH ASPARAGUS WITH A LITTLE OLIVE OIL AND LEMON ZEST ARE IDEAL ACCOMPANIMENTS.

6 fish fillets (1 to 11/2 pounds total), skin removed (sole, flounder and orange roughy are all good, mild fish)

1 garlic clove, minced

3 sprigs parsley, chopped

1 teaspoon chopped fresh dill

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

1 cup mayonnaise

1/3 cup fresh-grated parmesan cheese

Place fish in one layer in a 9-by-13-inch baking dish coated with no-stick cooking spray. In mixing bowl, stir together garlic, parsley, dill, mustard, mayonnaise and parmesan cheese. Spread mayonnaise mixture evenly over each fillet. Bake fish on top third rack of oven at 425 degrees about 20 minutes until topping puffs and browns. Makes 6 servings.

Per fillet: 387 calories, 75 percent calories from fat, 21 grams protein, .53 gram carbohydrates, .05 gram total fiber, 32 grams total fat, 84 milligrams cholesterol, 448 milligrams sodium.