A matter of taste

As anyone who belongs to an exclusive club will know, the point of belonging to an exclusive club is to shut the door on the people not in your club, and feel a little bit smug.  This is why for every one person who celebrates the success of a band or singer by spouting on about how they have been saying for years how good she was, there are nine people who will respond with ‘yes, but I was a fan before the John Lewis advert’.  This is the equivalent of being a member of the club in the days before it admitted women.

Exclusivity is all very well, but as we head into Christmas (traditionally a season of goodwill, Christian celebration and a huge increase in sales of indigestion remedies), adverts try to sell exclusivity for the mass market.  Perfume may be marketed as being worn only by beautiful and glamorous people, but something tells me that they brew it up by the bucketload on some industrial estate in Halifax, rather than, as the ad would have you believe, in some artisan dwelling somewhere exotic, or maybe just extracted directly from the bodily fluids of the celebrity flogging the pong.  Bombarded by choice, it’s increasingly difficult to make your own mind up.

Like salad cream.

Salad cream. 

What is salad cream?

Salad cream is the working class equivalent of mayonnaise or salad dressing.

Salad cream is what, in the nineteen seventies, you squirted in quantity over your salad to try and make iceberg lettuce more interesting, a feat that would actually require you to douse the stuff in LSD.  Like many products of the nineteen seventies, the application of science to a problem resulted in something that could and should far better have been resolved through the use of a natural solution.

This applied to life generally, but to fibres and food specifically.  Witness, for example, nylon, which was used not just to make fabrics for carpets and curtains and furniture, but also for clothes in a period, despite the appliance of science that resulted in nuclear energy, that with breathtaking irony suffered power shortages.  Presumably not in the home of anyone building up enormous static charges as they walked, sat or merely fidgeted.  In food there was the discovery of man made flavours.  I will concede that the invention of the pickled onion monster munch is probably one of the greatest achievements of mankind, but angel delight was, surely, a dessert creation too far.  And then we have salad cream.

Salad cream certainly perked up any salad, by completely overwhelming any other flavour, that flavour being a mixture of tangy and petrochemical.

I am not, believe me, mocking or knocking or in any way belittling salad cream.  I have myself moved on culinarily, but not far.  I still use salad dressing and I am not fooling myself for an instant as I reach past the balsamic vinaigrette, past the Italian dressing, past the mayo and straight for the thick, creamy goodness of the ranch because, for me, salad is essentially a ranch delivery system.  Apparently standing at the kitchen counter spooning the stuff into your mouth is not acceptable behaviour but somehow the involvement of cucumber makes it alright.

I had salad cream in a sandwich recently and it triggered a flashback so profound that I expected to see, looking down, a pair of pipe-cleaner legs with scabby and grass stained knees ending in dirty feet stuffed into scuffed trainers.

Salad cream comes in a plastic squeezy bottle.  It is a particular yellowing colour somewhere between mayo and mustard most usually associated with decades old tins of what was once white paint discovered at the back of sheds, or anything in the fridge described as ‘off’.

And it’s bloody delicious.  I don’t need to be told what to eat, I don’t care if it’s common and I don’t want to be part of a foodie club that means I can only eat what I’m told.  The bottle makes a farting noise when it squirts which is bloody hilarious and it turns salad into an unexpected delight.  Truly, when it comes to taste, it’s a matter of just that.