Good Food Blog
The secret is in the sauce
Posted at 11:55AM, 10 September 2008 by Adrian Bridgwater - Journalist
My wife and I are both committed sauce addicts. While she prefers ketchup, I am firmly entrenched in the brown camp. HP, Fruity, Jerk, BBQ, Worcestershire or even A1 steak sauce if I'm stateside.
We can't help it, honestly. So we've both grown up learning to shrug off interminable comments such as, "Would you like some food with your sauce?".
My better half says it got her through what she calls the "Broccoli Years", when her mother would insist that she ate steaming plates of the stuff, which she would 'sauce-up' to aid consumption. Of course now she loves it with butter and salt and pepper instead, like a (ah-hem) normal person.
My wife is in fact American and some time back now she introduced me to the 'Sloppy Joe' hamburger, sometimes also called the 'Manwich'. This at first ridiculous proposition is effectively minced beef in a wet tomato-flavoured burger sauce - all served in a bun. Will it fall out and go all over your face? Yes. Is this part of the fun? Yes it most certainly is.
But jocularity aside, the dangers of children eating too much sauce can not and should not be underestimated. With mutations like green ketchup around - designed to make food more "fun" - perhaps we really should stop and think about the content of our condiments.
Firstly, there's the sugar factor. Ketchup contains a lot of sugar and so do the BBQ sauces of this world. Second comes sodium, in all its forms. Sauce contains salt for taste, but also compounds such as sodium benzoate, which work as a preservative. To your body though, they are pretty much all salt.
My father balks at the very idea of any sauce and won't even anoint a sausage with a coat of Colman's. To me this is heresy; to him it's an opportunity to taste the food as it should be, plainly served.
The more gastronomically developed among us may feel that unless a sauce is a reduction of at least two aged vinegars and the strained cooking juices of an organic guinea fowl served in a 'boat', then it's not a sauce.
But I think the great British public would be hard pressed to deny themselves a dab of red or brown sauce to extend the manifold pleasures of a bacon sandwich. So maybe this is just an exercise in self-help and an admission that I should cut back a bit.
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