Pickle

Just a short one today! About everybody's favorite pasttime! You guessed it! Condiments!!!!

While I am personally not that big on condiments, I do live with what I shall term a big condiment fan. So I am exposed to the English-style use of a wide variety quite regularly.

For comparison purposes, I would say in the US the main-stays are ketchup, 'American' mustard, Dijon mustard, mayonnaise, and salsa. Of these, I generally partake of ketchup with fries and on burgers. And I like a bit of salsa. Oh, and let's say barbecue sauce. In addition to salsa, I'm working on incorporating these two into the English dialect - BBQ with chicken and apparently as a little snack to eat off your finger, salsa with scrambled eggs and tacos.

So on this side of the pond they again have the ketchup (on rare occasion termed 'red sauce'), mayonnaise, and mustard. Then things get trickier. In addition to mayo there is salad cream, which is sold next to mayo in the grocery store and essentially looks like mayo but smells different. I don't know if people put it on green salads, but Mark puts it on ham sandwiches and mixes it in with tuna. While we have the two main varieties of mustard, here there is a third, which is English mustard. It's more speckled than the unnaturally purely yellow French's brand variety, but less seedy than your Grey Poupon.

Then there is the ever-perplexing brown sauce. But I've come to believe it's just steak sauce. It's made by Heinz. There's some in my fridge. It may be used with steaks, but I don't ever have steak so I don't really know. It's most common usage involves being a dip for fries, or perhaps it's involved in eggs on toast, and ketchup is also used in both of these functions. They also use mayo with their fries sometimes, but I don't think I've seen salad cream used in such a role...

One that I totally don't get is the one I can't spell. Worchestershire sauce (pronounced 'Wooster')? It's a thin liquid that Mark does strange things with. He puts it in his tomato juice regularly, and then sometimes on things like pizza. It scares me so I don't really know what it tastes like.

In addition, the most commonly seenn form of the pickle is that of Branston pickle, which comes in a jar in what appears to be a really thick sauce. It's pickles in tiny little cubes combined with some kind of sauce, which is then spread on sandwiches. This creates such classics as the cheese and pickle. It's strange, but if you get a something and pickle sandwich, this is what you should expect!

And finally, a shout out to Brian the birthday boy! He'll be out partying tonight!! Hope it's a good one!