Plochman’s, baby!
Thumbs up! Their Kosciusko spicy brown mustard is my favorite everyday sandwich and sausage mustard.
ETA: Oh, I also really like this one. It’s from Buffalo, and is a yellow horseradish mustard:
It’s also nice because, no matter how hard I try to keep that nozzle clean on the Plochman’s mustard, it always ends up getting gunked up and I have to remove the top and scrape some from inside with a knife. The Weber’s is a plastic jar, so really easy to get to the mustard, though it’s not squirtable.
Yellow mustard on hamburgers and hot dogs, brown mustards on sausages and deli meats.
You start it and I’ll be right there with the UK’s finest HP Sauce. The condiment that makes everything taste like…HP Sauce. I mean, there are other condiments that do that too, but HP Sauce tastes bad. Why would you?*
Mind you, there’s also Piccalilli, which makes everything taste of vinegary raw vegetables. Choices, choices…
j
* - to save anyone else the bother: Because British food tastes worse?
My grandmother was from Hungary, and her cabbage rolls were awesome. When we drove Back East for a family reunion when I was about 15, she made a gabillion pans of them for our picnic. Hey, what else do you have at a picnic? But hers had a wonderful vinegary oniony tomato sauce they soaked in. Yummy!
Oh, and as for this, I’ve seen it done as a casserole, but not really a soup/stew kind of thing. That said, it would make for a perfectly lovely soup. I mean, cabbage, rice, and meat … come to think of it, I’m not entirely unsure I haven’t seen golabki soup somewhere.
ETA: Sure enough, the internet has it:
British HP is basically the same as American A1 sauce. I can use either one, but only in small amounts. Otherwise they overpower the taste of whatever you put them on. (The same goes for Heinz 57 sauce,)
I’ve seen Australians and New Zealanders put ketchup on meat pies. I can’t believe this enhances their flavor.
It probably does. Tourtieres, empanadas, samosas, Cornish pasties… all can be very good. Australian ones were not nearly as highly spiced or seasoned and needed something else. Salsa would work better, if you ask me, which you aren’t.
There’s a Mexican fast food chain here that makes these. So good. I get them once or twice a year.
Which only goes to prove there’s no bad idea that can’t be made worse.
Cthurkey, anyone?
When I was younger, stores carried pralines wrapped in plastic. That combination of chewy caramel and pecans was awesome. I later took a trip to New Orleans and found a place that sold fresh ones. I thought they would be awesome.
They were terrible. I would liken the “caramel” to fudge that didn’t set properly. It was all grainy, a sugar bomb with no mellowness. Locals who bought from that place seemed to like them that way, though. Are there two different recipes for these?
I beg to differ on that one, in effect Tarmarind sauce (it does taste a bit like A1, but not, also an alternative brand Daddies) is a wonderous sauce, and the thing which went on my chips until I discovered Mayonnaise on them in Belgium. I find Ketchup a bland and tasteless product.
I’d say one of the wonders of British Cuisine is a Bacon sandwich with brown sauce on soft thick white Hovis bread. I’m not sure I’ve seen that bread elsewhere (maybe I never found its name in the US when they ask me which of the ten different types of bread I want, I usually just say white or sourdough).
The bread is soft. The bacon is thick (like canadian bacon). The brown sauce works very well with the bacon. When we came back from three weeks on Portland and San Francisco last month (and there seemed to be mostly the same stuff on every bars menu nowadays, so much less variety), it was the Bacon sandwich with brown sauce on that bread which I was craving. US bacon just… Isn’t for me.
The caramel ones might be called pralines, but they’re more like what I know as turtles. Pralines traditionally are sugary with that sugar-grainy texture.
Good God do I love HP Sauce (or any of a number of brown sauces, like Daddies). It’s a bit spendy here in the States. Wonderful on fries/chips. While we’re on British condiments, Branston Pickle is another wonderful flavor accent. I used to buy it every couple of weeks until I stopped shopping at one of the stores that carries it here. I used to try to mimic brown sauce by mixing ketchup with Worcestershire, which gets me somewhat in the ballpark. Ketchup with A1 also kind of gets you there, but not quite. Heinz 57 with Worcester is a bit closer. I found some recipes online for it, but it just seemed too much work.
These days I like to do a nice vinegar-based hot sauce on fries. I find mayo okay, but just not enough of an acidic hit, which is what I like with fried foods. That said, with proper pommes frites, nothing but a mayo or mayo-based sauce works right for me.
The combination, quite simply, is Branston and a mature cheddar. Such a superb combination. There are some little unique and wonderful bits of british food which really does work, but they’re often forgotten about. I remembered about it when I got a ploughmans lunch once in London, a really good one, in one of the rare pubs which did it (it got knocked down for HS2). Fresh baked half baguette still hot. A wonderful flavourful cheddar. A pickle like branston (might even have been better). Superb tasty ham. Nice pickled onions. Bliss.
For me it’s Bulldog Sauce, one of the ones used on tonkatsu. $10 a pint on Amazon.
I think I’m actually more partial to Daddies than HP. I have and like both. In any case they are what I dip my chips in when I have an EBCB.
I was watching an episode of Endeavour not long ago in which Thursday’s daughter was eating a sandwich made with white bread. It reminded me of the bread I ate when I was living in England almost 50 years ago. I don’t remember if it was Hovis bread, but it might have been. In any case, I was fed up with the spongey white bread sold at my local supermarket anyway, so I decided to start baking my own. I have come very close to the British version I remember, in both texture and taste. (I still put deli meats on rye bread, though.)
When it comes to “chips,” I’ve never had them with mayonnaise, but I have with tartar sauce, and they’re delicious that way.
I put brown sauce on meat pies (sparingly), but I don’t care for the mix of ketchup and the gravy inside the pies.
The turtles I know are chewy caramel covered pecans that are then covered with chocolate. And they are redonk.
Those cabbage-leaf wrapped dishes can be amazing. Grape-leave wrapped ones are even better. I’m sure some people do it badly, but that doesn’t make them bad per se.
Last year for a BBQ I tried out wrapping stuff in the fig leaves from the tree in my front garden. The leaves got pretty burnt, but were still surprisingly edible, and everything we tried cooking in them was fucking delicious.
I do think the UK is unusual for the quality of its pre-sliced bread. The rest of Europe disparages it all as “tostbrot,” but it’s not the same as their cheap pre-sliced bread, which is crap because it’s sort of meant to be - anyone who wants decent bread gets it from a bakery. The US does have some decent bread too, TBH, just not available in every tiny Tesco Express equivalent.