A Matter of Taste Mini Sauces

Gentleman’s Choice

Frankly, I find myself a little baffled at the proposition.  What, after all, is a ‘mini sauce’.  Sauces should, of course, be served in just the right quantity, from a sauce dispenser, usually a covered bowl, ornamental for preference and, if you are really doing things properly, originally serving some entirely different function.  The silver plated severed head of a sworn enemy used to be all the go in mess halls of yore, although these days polite society is apt to frown on such things, meaning that instead, no dinner table is complete without the head of some beast that one has slaughtered in a gamesmanlike fashion as a novelty sauce dispenser.  Vegitarianites may protest all they like, but a dollop of brown sauce on one’s kippers of a morning tastes so much better when dispensed from the silvered skull of that badger you killed with a snooker cue after it had gotten into the roses.  Red sauce is, of course, served from the skull of a fox.

Mustard is tricky, and to be respected.  Best kept in a simple scallop shell.

Those requiring French mustard are quite free to obtain it after first leaving the table, house, and country.

The novelty sauce dispenser is nothing new, in the 1970s no self respecting working class café, the sort of place that lorry drivers used to congregate for sandwiches and much tea to fortify themselves for the long drive ahead, was complete without a tomato sauce bottle shaped like a large tomato.

The point is, of course, that a small bowl, or selection of bowls, and corresponding spoons, are quite sufficient for any appetite.

The exception is, of course, to be found in hotels.

Is there anything quite so delightful as those wee jars of sauce that the room service chap, or even chapess, brings when delivering one a late supper?  The hospitality industry loves miniatures, from mini-bars to soaps the size of postage stamps.  In the right place, at the right time, the miniature sauce pot is not just perfectly acceptable, it is perfection.

Player’s Choice

 Right.  First things first.  There are two sauces, red and brown.  Or, if you are from the North, brown and red.  Sauces come in bottles.  They do not come in jars, nor poncy bowls.  They do not come in plastic packets that some, in a misguided attempt to introduce foreign language into the sauce debate in the false apprehension that foreign equals sophisticated or better, describe as ‘sachets’.  Plastic packets of sauce are an abomination and are fit for only one thing, to be discarded with contempt, or of course, much more likely, hoarded in a kitchen draw but never, ever, used.

Sauce comes in bottles.  It also comes out of bottles, if you shake really, really hard.

Surely there is no experience so beatific as a child as grasping an adult sized sauce bottle in two child sized hands and shaking it in the up and down motion of a crazed campanologist, only to be delivered of a puddle of sauce on your plate which was, of course, the objective all along.

Why bother with a spoon and a jar when one can, with experience, practice, and dedication to ones art, direct the jet of sauce under steady pressure from a plastic bottle with all the accuracy of a sauce sharpshooter.  Or with a well timed sequence of sharp spanks to the bottom of a bottle, distribute globs of goodness ‘pon the plate.  Yes, the bottle is the right receptacle.

Novelty dispensers have their place.  For the squishy plastic tomato that place was Wimpy and that time was 1978.  It was glorious but let us move on.  Sauce bottles in cafes should properly have a dried crust around the top of the bottle.  This is revolting, but nobody expects you to eat it so stop fucking moaning.

Finally, brands.  I have no time for brands, usually.  But occasionally there’s one that simply tastes like quality.  And since those bastards at HP started manufacturing their ‘sauce’ abroad, and so ruined it for everyone forever, there’s only one sauce that goes on my sausage sarnie.  ‘Daddies’.

The cafe keeps a bottle behind the counter for me.

Quality.