Condiments

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering podcast produced by Tell Me Studios for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm Fraser McGruer and I'm here with Nick Hare, Chris Wragg and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing condiments. Nick, I believe you've got a chutney related anecdote to regale us with.

Speaker B: 00:00:32

Not really an anecdote but a chutney problem nevertheless. I'm sure it's common to a lot of blokes in their 30s and 40s and it's the problem it does. Yeah which is that at Christmas relatives give you chutney. Sometimes it's chutney they've made, sometimes they've bought it from a shop but for some reason I think I'm bracketed as a sort of chutney fan. I'm seen as the kind of person who likes chutney and that's right I am. I mean I like chutney. Often people get me chilli flavoured chutneys but you know the point is that the supply of chutney in general vastly exceeds any reasonable demand and with the result I end up with a you know gradually growing pool of chutney and you have to literally look for excuses to get rid of it. You've got to invite people over to eat cheese just so you can get rid of some of the chutney and anyway it got me thinking well where did where does the idea of chutney come from and but also like condiments in general. So why have we fixated on the condiments that we have for example but chutney is clearly a thing. I know it's a way of preserving vegetables but you know there's lots of things you could give people. Lots of different ways of doing that and then you know why have we got for example salt and pepper. Why do we get salt and pepper on our tables but not you know cumin and nutmeg. So yeah the whole question of condiments. Why have we got the ones we've got and what does it tell us about us and yeah as a species. Sure well I was going to

Speaker A: 00:02:02

say with the chutney really we should just get it in sort of receptacles that are about a quarter the size that we actually do get it in but then that would make it sort of fairly pointless for the people making the chutney even if it's just your grandma sort of making it because yeah she's got to do something with all those pickles whatever but yeah I think the second question is more interesting than the first question but anyway Chris. Well I was just going to say as Nick

Speaker C: 00:02:28

alluded to you know the reason the original reason for condiments is you know preservation. Stop babies. Stop babies that's right yes. To preserve food stuff so you know condiment comes from the latin condire to pickle and you know pickling was obviously a preservative process sources is derived from salt saltiness the latin for saltiness and again you know that was originally a preservative but obviously they've evolved into reflecting our you know our individual tastes so and what I think is particularly illustrative or insightful about condiments is that they are external to the meal themselves right so you know the the chef or whoever prepares the meal and brings something along to you but the one the one part of the meal that you have autonomy over is the condiments it's like your ability to to individually tailor the meal to your to your tastes and that's why I think people people are you know are sort of quite emotional about condiments often and and you know what that what they what they want and they get quite attached to particular condiments. Yeah

Speaker A: 00:03:48

my daughter's really attached to tomato ketchup yeah she'll put that on anything well I mean

Speaker B: 00:03:51

that's another why is tomato ketchup the king of the condiments why is why is that everywhere I

Speaker C: 00:03:57

mean why not you know hp sauce why did ketchup win do you know do you know where where ketchup comes from it sounds indonesian uh yeah yeah well indirectly so I think it was originally a chinese fish sauce that then spread to malaysia and indonesia um and uh yeah and and had no

Speaker B: 00:04:15

tomatoes in interestingly no and if i think ketchup just means that you can get that you know mushroom ketchup which i see occasionally yeah as a thing so let's try and focus this and we're going to

Speaker A: 00:04:25

come on to peter but but but let's sort of take stock here so if we're if we're talking uk for condiments that we'd most commonly see on the table we're talking um salt and pepper um maybe some

Speaker B: 00:04:37

some tomato ketchup i think vinegar is the most is it quite a uk kind of specific thing i think vinegar is less salt and pepper you're going to see in a lot of places yeah i don't know if you know that i mean if you're not as well traveled as me so you might not know that salt and pepper is quite common yeah but vinegar is a bit unusual it's unusual you don't i mean you don't get vinegar as standard in the states for example mustard of course very popular in central europe what mustard is a condiment that you would yeah you wouldn't you would you would sometimes get it in restaurants here but you definitely get it ubiquitous yeah and i i never really bothered

Speaker A: 00:05:07

with mustard until i was living in germany for a short while and then i saw what it was all about i thought yes that's what my sausage needs yeah um peter weighed in for us um maybe on this area of

Speaker D: 00:05:19

what's normal what sort of well i have no problem with my chutney i mean i think i love chutney but i don't have nick's problem of having too much of it so uh um if anyone's got a spare chutney i'll nick's got some chutney trade in the offing yeah um i think yeah but i think there is some interesting cultural things which we sort of touched on why is it that certain cultures have certain condiments and others don't as much but i think the boring answer is probably that certain additional flavors to suit suit suit particular cuisine so um ketchup uh and mayo go well with chips generally and um whereas cumin you know in cultures that eat less chips then you probably find less ketchup and mayo i don't know maybe um yeah cumin if you've got if you eat

Speaker B: 00:06:06

beans you know like in the middle east you get some sort of bean based dish i think you're that's where your cumin comes into its own yeah so ketchup and beans to do with to do with

Speaker D: 00:06:16

complementing the substrate of the meal um different condiments but what i think is interesting if you consider chips chips pretty universally you can go anywhere in the world get chips um and given that we're all biologically pretty similar um there must be an optimal flavor combination of chips plus some condiment there must be an optimum condiment for chips but yeah we still different cultures have different condiments on offer um so belgium and france places you probably have mayonnaise and pepper with your chips rather than ketchup and vinegar um that's a very sort of american and british thing to have ketchup so but so why is that i

Speaker B: 00:06:53

and which is better yeah and i think because there are costs in uh it's a sort of diversifying it's kind of costly to have uh different condiments in every restaurant for example simply because you know take a chef who's trained to adjust for the fact that people have salt and pepper and put him somewhere where people have got control of their own chili and uh and parmesan and and you know he's gonna be completely thrown but then of course you know the specializer the fact that we can mass produce salt and pepper because we know everyone wants them is cheaper there's reasons why you would expect to find the same sorts of condiments everywhere but but the question is why those ones you know and i think in the case of salt i mean there's a fairly universal answer for salt which is that it makes things taste nice and salty yeah i mean well yeah i mean i think what salt does is it suppresses bitterness so so that's why salty food tastes nice but of course there's a limit i mean what the question is why don't chefs just do that right the chef should be adding the salt and i think these days it's actually in a lot of restaurants you don't get salt and pepper yeah it's just so it's not it's being yeah they don't

Speaker C: 00:07:58

like the um the diner to have autonomy over yeah exactly and now the question is whether or not we

Speaker B: 00:08:05

but peter's right in the sense that there are you know people have different tastes we have different tastes for perhaps historical reasons so apparently pepper i didn't know this but apparently pepper is uh was sort of popularized by louis the 14th the sun king uh because he it was believed to be the only spice that didn't change the flavor of the food so it was allowed it was a sort of noble spice now we may not agree with louis the 14th the sun king but would have been beheaded if we did yeah but so and so apparently that was the one reason for the popularity of pepper and so it had you know purely historical accident has seen pepper on the table of every house in britain um had louis the 14th had a similar feeling about um you know five spice could be a different story

Speaker C: 00:08:46

so so you know like ketchup you mentioned your daughter's ketchup addiction and you know it's obviously the the kind of number one source that you would think of particularly in the you know the anglo-saxon world um but heinz started out making horseradish right now horseradish much more kind of i mean my wife loves horseradish but i'm not a not a big fan it's not it's much more niche taste and and doesn't uh isn't as universal you know in its in its application to foodstuffs um so there's obviously something about ketchup vice uh horseradish that means that was a commercially successful you know um option and and you know um what is it that makes ketchup much uh better selling than horseradish and i think here we're basically is a question

Speaker B: 00:09:43

of how much faith we should put in post-modernism um a post-modernist approach to condiments would see their adoption as purely a matter of historical narratives uh you know of of of well the reason we've got ketchup uh is because of you know american kind of american cultural hegemony and imperialism uh versus the sort of uh if you like the kind of um neoclassical kind of approach which would say well we we have those condiments because they're nice because they work best um i don't really know i i feel like where we've ended up is is a sort of compromise between the two i mean clearly salt and pepper is is is better than you know battery acid and uh and and um you know yaks milk but uh not if you're mongolian maybe except for the battery acid bit um but i'm not convinced it's the best and i and so i was having a look at different condiments according to cnn there are 32 condiments 32 that cnn can't live without cnn travel right 32 condiments we can't live without and these include gochujang datu puti vinegar and lingonberry jam yeah so i can only assume that cnn people who work for cnn travel are permanently in intensive care when they can't literally can't live without these condiments i'm a bit more easygoing than that but i i think the you know i would like to see more chili sauce for example and i think if it wasn't culturally uh insensitive i would probably carry my own sort of condiments with me i'd i'd have the ones that i like which particularly well like one thing i discovered in austria which was table sea liquid seasoning which is a bit like soy sauce but tastes different yeah i'd never heard of this you mentioned it's great stuff yeah so that you get that on to the table so it's kind of like it's more it's more it's more like soy sauce but it doesn't taste like soy sauce uh it's kind of almost meatier um so yeah i would i would probably have a bottle of that and a bottle of really hot chili sauce because

Speaker D: 00:11:40

i'm nothing is ever spicy enough for me but okay would you also take your baked beans away in in vm25 in a suitcase full of baked beans when you go on holiday well look let's um because the baked beans in norfolk don't taste like they do in london that is widely acknowledged they don't

Speaker A: 00:11:56

travel baked beans um look we could carry on sort of at a macro level but i think it's possibly more interesting to talk this about at a micro level which we've just started going into there

Speaker C: 00:12:09

um chris well i was just gonna say you know i think there's a case to be made for condiments actually being reflective of of culture so if you think of you know mexican salsa or something and you think of uh you know it being reflective of an exuberant kind of colorful culture if you you know you think of um americans and and ketchup and you think about it being sort of um feeding a sugar dependency yeah well it being yes very sweet but also brightly colored sort of artificial bright color but kind of mass mass produced very successful um but maybe lacking a little bit of refinement in taste dare i say accessible highly accessible yeah exactly um you know you think of um italians and uh and the use of uh lots of oil for example and they're slightly you know mercurial nature you know um brits brits and and they're cheesy of course it's widely acknowledged old-fashioned bitterness is horseradish sauce and yeah or gravy kind of you know stolid um brown i think like brown sauce but actually i would argue brown

Speaker B: 00:13:19

sauce is a very british sort of a sauce yeah um and and it's a really not very showy i think one of the reasons we feel affectionate about brown sauce is it doesn't make a big deal of it yeah it's extremely tasty i love brown sauce which actually by the way my father-in-law from brazil

Speaker A: 00:13:33

visiting us in the uk once horrified me by putting hp sauce on some salad i said what the hell are you doing but he thought it was perfectly nice and normal to him but actually something you were saying there uh chris about cultural differences one thing i have a theory and one thing i think i've noticed is that in countries which until relatively recently were didn't have such a high level development or or let's say access to to certain condiments now just go crazy for them so for example something i've noticed in poland is they just go nuts for for ketchup and they will just smother everything in i mean just you wouldn't believe what they put that on so they'll just bit of bit of cheese and bread well that's obviously missing some ketchup and they chuck and they smother it and they do that a lot in poland and they do that a lot in brazil and so i have a theory about you know they didn't have access to this stuff now they do now

Speaker D: 00:14:20

they go for it um making up for lost time under the oppressive soviet republic yeah yeah um so just

Speaker B: 00:14:29

uh while we're on condiment trends um something i decry which is uh sachets right they're almost ubiquitous now they're never enough and they never open properly it's a good example of something a bit like a bit like hand dryers or those push down taps which are you know a technological improvement that's definitely worse um i i cannot remember the last time i went into a cafe and saw a bottle of ketchup shaped like a tomato and i love that those things yeah you never get enough sauce i don't know what the point you know because on one hand you think well maybe they're afraid that people will waste sauce if it comes in bottles but how many times do you see people

Speaker D: 00:15:07

throwing out those sachets i don't think it's a waste thing i think it's a health and safety thing so you can guarantee that it's going to be unsullied and it means that you don't have to go

Speaker C: 00:15:15

around cleaning and emptying all the bottles every i mean i think cafes should be judged by the um quality of their their condiment provision um i think that's a key indicator yeah we need to tell

Speaker A: 00:15:29

trip advisor about that yeah well look we're slightly meandering index i want to bring this home a little bit uh peter favorite condiment condiment you can do with that uh i'd like nick

Speaker D: 00:15:38

i do like chili sauce as a condiment um but actually i think mayonnaise and may and mayonnaise like things like hollandaise sauce sort of cheesy high fat sauces i'd much rather have um uh hollandaise or bayonets with my steak than i would have a pepper sauce i find yeah

Speaker A: 00:15:58

mayonnaise i just find it a bit queasy makes me feel a bit queasy um but um so chili especially

Speaker B: 00:16:04

if it's just come out of an old jar that your gran keeps in the cupboard yeah not in the fridge in the cupboard yeah and it's got that slightly translucent on the top yeah then the person who's using it just stirs that in oh no it's a bit like if only she kept sachets it's a bit like that salad cream i can't stand salad cream it tastes like gone off mayonnaise yeah yeah yeah

Speaker C: 00:16:23

uh chris your condiment of choice uh well two i would say um german sweet mustard so um is lovely we don't get it over here which is a shame and then the other one that uh i like is maple syrup on um on savory breakfast items salty savory breakfast items a real revelation it's

Speaker D: 00:16:47

also quite difficult to get in suitable quantities it's quite expensive so if any listeners want to

Speaker B: 00:16:53

send us some would be great yeah well we had i made i made american pancakes on uh on saturday morning with with bacon and bananas and yeah we had ros got some uh some um uh maple syrup for christmas so it was really an excuse to eat maple syrup so i totally agree over bacon and on your

Speaker A: 00:17:09

eggs as well um yeah we've got yours which is chili or yeah although it's not there's not one

Speaker B: 00:17:16

chili sauce to rule them all to be honest i go through phases you know and um it's generally i'd like to have different ones so uh yeah you know at the moment i got a um i when i was uh when i was in portsmouth recently i found a little stall selling their own homemade chili chutney that's absolutely stonking uh california reaper chili uh sort of spicy condiment thing uh it's not really a sauce it's more of a paste but i've been putting that on everything it's incredible

Speaker A: 00:17:44

well i'm impressed by the diversity here um i have to say i mean i don't really have one i mean yeah like a bit of salt bit of pepper um and every now and again yeah i'll try a bit of ketchup on that a bit of you know a bit of uh pickle i mean i don't know there's there's no one thing i've

Speaker C: 00:18:00

heard chip spice i've never i've never tried it but i've heard chip spice it's a sort of northern thing is supposed to be really quite chip spice yeah and that's different to curry sauce for example yeah yeah no it's a sort of um i think it sounds a little bit like the the uh the thing nick was talking about earlier that sort of liquid um salty flavored thing well there's there's a i

Speaker B: 00:18:24

mean the i suppose the biggest new sauce really over the last few years i think it's been burger sauce which um i've only really seen it on sale in in the last few years in in supermarkets to have at home and it's essentially uh the sauce that you get in a big mac as far as i can tell and that's big now but you know people will have chips with burger sauce on it when they go to a chicken shop and i love burger sauce goes with it loads of things yeah yeah because my ham but if i go to

Speaker A: 00:18:56

mcdonald's my burger of choice is a big mac and i always do wonder what what's that sauce because i have not tasted it anywhere else and the answer is it's burger sauce is that right yeah i think

Speaker B: 00:19:05

it's kind of basically kind of like ketchup and mayonnaise mixed together with a few pickles

Speaker A: 00:19:10

yeah yeah that's called but no that's got a name that sauce so it's called rose rose thousand island dressing no no no there's if you if so they've again this is a brazilian thing the ranch sauce no no it's called something like let's just call it rose sauce for a moment that's not what

Speaker B: 00:19:26

it's called but let's call it that no that yeah that's that's mary rose sauce for for prawn cocktails right which is ketchup and mayonnaise it is that's why i said it's basically ketchup and mayonnaise with some pickles in it okay and and onions yeah anyway uh i feel like this has been a really intellectual podcast i've really gone into depth here um look we need to finish

Speaker A: 00:19:47

off there um you know beyond we've already just talked about our personal taste in terms of condiments um yeah on that note i think we should just go off and have a hamburger what do you reckon well up for it okay right we'll stop there um we'll report back any findings that we have from our expedition our research yeah exhaustive research yeah um thank you as always for listening to the cognitive engineering podcast i'm fraser mcgrew we've been here with chris wragg nick hare and peter coghill of aleph insights uh thank you and uh happy munching i guess happy condiment sourcing bye