From reading the thread about how you heat your water, https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=876284
I noticed a mention of salad cream. What the hell is that? Is it a British version of Miracle Whip?
Dennis
It’s like a vinegary mayonnaise - more on the vinegar taste than the mayo. I haven’t had it for years but ate it a lot as a child - a common sandwich condiment.
Heinz make it, amongst others.
Decades ago, someone told me about a porn film (I think it was Barbara Broadcast) where a woman had some unique salad dressing. Never saw it, but the description won’t leave my head when I hear ‘salad cream’.
There is definitely such a scene in Barbara Broadcast, and that is exactly where my mind went as well.
Now, now - let’s return to salad dressings. At some point after preserves in jars were invented, but before there was the technology available to put mayonnaise in a jar, someone invented salad cream, something a bit like mayonnaise but stable in a jar. Possibly that accounts for the additional vinegar taste (to preserve?) noted by SanVito. ( I see that the wiki page mentions Miracle Whip - no idea what this is though, so I can’t compare; sorry)
As I noted on another thread, these days we have mayo in a jar, but salad cream persists. It’s a proper guilty pleasure - there’s something seedy and cheap about the way it tastes, and this takes away all the virtue of a salad. Lovely.
j
Not the first thing to come to my mind, but now hard to get rid of it.
Yes, enough with the porn discussion if you please.
“Miracle Whip Salad Dressing” is the full name of it. It is like mayo but with more sugar and vinegar. Tangy and sweet. I grew up with it, but now prefer straight mayo most of the time. I only want Miracle Whip at Thanksgiving for turkey sandwiches, and if I’m making a lobster roll.
Heinz Salad Cream is somewhat tangier than Miracle Whip. I prefer it for a zippier sandwich.
Now I have a new condiment to look for! I’m a Miracle Whip guy anyway. And what about the brown sauce the Brits put on bacon sandwiches, how does it taste?
Dennis
Perhaps of interest is that in the UK the ingredients are listed in percentage order. So salad cream has more vinegar than water and more water than rapeseed oil.
Like A1 combined with a couple dashes of Worcestershire, sort of. You can buy HP sauce relatively easily in the U.S. I know my local grocery store carries it, in a small section with other British foods (like Branston pickle and Marmite, among others).
There is this popular idea of salad cream as a commercially-produced ersatz mayonnaise, but there’s a recipe for it in Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management from 1861, where it’s clearly just its own thing — a dressing for salad.
It’s definitely available in larger US supermarkets. I had an Irish friend in grad school, who would buy it often. I tried it, really liked it for a while on my sandwiches, but then got a bit tired of it. It’s been over 20 years, sp this thread is prompting me to pick some up this weekend.
It has fallen out of favour so much in the uk that there are plans to rename it sandwich cream, given that its mostly used in sandwiches nowadays…
Same convention in the US, AFAIK. The USFDA (US Food & Drug Administration) site says "the ingredients are listed in order of predominance, with the ingredients used in the greatest amount first, followed in descending order by those in smaller amounts. " Whether that’s exactly the same as by percentage, I’m not sure, but it’s the same idea.
What’s tricky there, though, is that vinegar itself has water in it, and can come in various strengths, though I’d guess around 5% strength. Miracle Whip’s ingredients start with “water, soybean oil, vinegar” so the predominance of vinegar is lower than the water and soybean oil, which should make it less tangy than Heinz salad cream (though it’s impossible to say for certain, unless we know vinegar acidities are standardized. Or, well, if we taste them. I do remember salad cream being tangier, but it’s been a long time since I’ve had it.)
Thank you for that, **WotNot **- I was repeating the story I had heard/seen, from what I took to be fairly authoritative sources (can’t remember so no cite, sorry). I suspect the essence of the story may be true (suitability for bottling compared to mayo) but you have certainly changed my mind about the details about what was available to use instead and where the recipe came from.
Curiosity piqued, I tracked down Mrs Beeton online. It wouldn’t be possible, I think, to describe Heinz salad cream as a copy of a specific Mrs B recipe; and the situation is further complicated by the fact that Mrs B offers a positive plethora of options.
Heinz Salad Cream
Mrs B p 1111
Mrs B p1112
Mrs B p231
But an entrepreneur clearly had a starting point readily available for creating a newfangled bottled dressing. Ignorance fought!
j
PS: but it does taste seedy and cheap compared to mayo - so enjoy!
Whenever I came across the term, I always used to picture hair creme, and I’d get completely nauseated.
When it was used as a salad cream, how was it used? Just plopped on the salad? Or mixed with other ingredients? If I’m making a mayo-based salad dressing, I’d never just use plain mayo (my current favorite concoction is mayo – Best Foods – with Sriracha and finely chopped fresh cilantro).
That doesn’t tell you much though, because vinegar + water = vinegar. Vinegar is available in varying dilutions, but there’s no such thing as 100% vinegar.
And they used to have Heinz salad creme available in the Army DFAC, and it’s, like everyone says, just Miracle Whip. Not the exact same recipe, but you won’t be disappointed if you use one in place of the other. You may not even notice.
It reminds me that my mom is very picky, with bland, but also still weird, tastes. We hardly ever had salad when I was growing up, but if we did, my mom’s idea of salad was just iceberg lettuce and Miracle Whip. End of ingredients. 
We always just dolloped some on our iceberg and tomato salads (70s kid). As noted, it’s great as a sandwich spread, we used to add a bit of green relish for extra pickly tang.