Who'se the Daddy?

Right!

Let’s be quite clear, I love condiments.

I occasionally consider that food, actual food, is essentially a primitive condiment delivery system (the same way that celery performs two functions; a thousand island dressing long spoon, and a jaunty adornment to your bloody Mary (the acceptable face of problem drinking)).

Condiments represent, to me at least, that moment in man’s evolution after he had tamed the beasts of the field (by cooking them) and the fruits (and veg) of the land (by turning them into alcohol…no, dammit, by roasting them on a Sunday alongside a joint of Beast o’ the Field) but before it all went Captain Titsup and his Carnival of Terror and industrialists instead of cooks started producing food.

(BTFW: Message to all ready-meal makers – I can add my own salt.  Salt is a readily available substance and many English people are quite capable of shaking it onto their food.  Normally before they have even tasted it.)

Condiments come from a golden age of food when people were thinking ‘oooh, these spices are interesting, what happens if I snort some…'

…twenty minutes later, when they had quite recovered, they decided that mixing spices with a vinegar base was a better idea.  And so condiments were born.

My favourite?  Worcestershire Sauce, naturally (see above), but I think a close second would be brown sauce.

It used to be HP Sauce.  Not now.

HP Sauce used to be made in England, it is now made abroad.

I have no problem with foreign condiments.  Tabasco sauce perks up a meal, especially when your host has neglected to mention it is a feature.  Still, who doesn’t sweat at dinner?

But, really?  It’s not EU Sauce, it’s HP sauce.  Houses of Parliament.  It has a history connected with England which if you could be arsed to ask Siri, I am sure she would tell you all about.  Surely this is the sort of thing that the EU invented that thing for food where it can only be made in the area it’s named, like Melton Mowbray pork pies, or some sort of cheese that can only be made by a particular cow in a specific field.

Also, it now tastes different.  And fuck right off if you are of the opinion that every single ingredient, including the bloke that stirred the mixture, was imported and is hence still the same.  It just does.  The same way that Banks’s Bitter took on hints of piss, shire horse piss mind, but still piss, once the brewer changed.

HP sauce is now made in the Netherlands, which may be neither here nor there, but that it is made abroad is, I think, important, because this is something that can raise a sausage to a religious experience.

Every time we sauce our sausages we are hoping for something extraordinary.

I have had a lot of sausages in a lot of places.  Generally the best have been from roadside cafes where I strongly suspect they have their own sauce recipe, which is the dregs from all their previous sauce bottles cut with (oh God I really hope it’s) vinegar.  In which case somebody should market it, although in retrospect the reason the sauces were so good is probably because they had been fermenting in a hot caravan for a while and hence are  a) mildly alcoholic and b) insanely wrong to serve to HGV drivers.

Hey ho.

But to the point.  HP Sauce is polluted.  Not actually, spiritually.  That’s why, when it comes to brown sauce, in the absence of a Roadside Cafe, I go Daddies.

It may possibly be owned by the same people, and made in the same factory, by the same stirrer guy (or lady), but it doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not.

Because a sauce is created to add flavour, not disguise it, and for that reason it needs to be honest.