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.

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.