Tonight’s question, over dinner, was brother-in-law wondering what people in other countries/regions have on their dinner tables, condiments-wise.
Like, we always have salt and pepper on the table, and with various meals there are specific condiments that are traditional. (Syrup for pancakes, ketchup for french fries, salsa for basically anything with tortillas and some things over eggs, jam for toast, butter for bread. That kind of thing.)
behind the cut, more discussion and examples, and a question: what condiments live on your table, and where do you live (you don’t have to be specific)?
My dude’s mother is Latvian and has a lot of cute salt-and-pepper-shaker sets from Latvia, and they always include a third container, a little pot for mustard. She grew up in the US and so has never actually filled that pot, but kept the sets, because they came with her parents from the old country. She’s not sure you can get the right kind of mustard here, though.
My other brother-in-law is from Mississippi/Louisiana, and it was a running joke in our family to put a shaker of… some brand-name of cayenne seasoning mix in salt, that he liked to put on things but we’d never heard of. Tony’s or something. I’ve stayed in his house, though, and while he frequently cooks with spice mixes like that, he doesn’t actually keep them on his table.
Farmsister had an Indian boyfriend in college who claimed that growing up, coriander and cumin were like salt and pepper to him, and Farmsister admitted she’d firsthand-witnessed that his dad had a drawer of whole spices in metal canisters that he pulled out and set on the counter whenever he was cooking. She qualified this statement, though, by saying those wouldn’t really be condiments on the table, but seasonings added by the cook to the whole dish, so it wasn’t the same thing, and she figured he was being poetic.
FarmManager was over for dinner (he often is; Farmsister always complains about having to cook for everyone but then she frets that it’s inefficient to have him always cooking for himself when it would be so easy to just feed him too. He reciprocates, though, sometimes, and it’s kind of great, he’s a great cook) and commented that when he’d stayed in B&B’s in the UK they’d had bottles of HP Brown Sauce on the table all the time. I pointed out, though, that that’s more like a restaurant. That’s not the same as what a person would have on the table in their house. It’d be like an American always having ketchup on the table– a lot of American restaurants do, because the food you eat in a restaurant so frequently needs ketchup, but that’s not the same as the stuff most of us eat at home.
I do know of people who keep red pepper sauce– like tabasco, or Frank’s hot sauce, or similar, the bright red, vinegar-based kind of hot sauce like they use on wings– on the table and apply it to almost everything they eat, but I don’t know how one would live like that. I like the stuff, but find it doesn’t go with most foods. Still, I reckon that’s a common enough Americanism– and you see a relic of that in the fact that so many of the US military’s MRE rations include miniature bottles of Tabasco hot sauce packaged with them. It’s clearly a common enough thing that the demand warranted their inclusion.
In most East Asian food restaurants– Thai, Vietnamese, Burmese, fancy Chinese– there are usually little jars of chili sauce in oil on the table, often not labeled, and you kind of have to guess what they are. Some are powerfully hot, some complex and garlicky. But would you have that stuff at home? My dude liked the stuff at the local pho restaurant so much he went and bought it at the store the waitress suggested, and he puts it in just about everything, but we don’t leave it on the table– the only thing we keep on the table is the salt and the pepper.
As a kid, though, my mom sometimes forgot to put salt and pepper onto the table, and never salted the food much. I grew up with a very middle-America palate, of not many seasonings and an emphasis on the plain unadorned taste of the food. We also never had fresh garlic in the house. This kind of thing has fortunately gone out of style, but it remains a bit ingrained in the habits– Farmsister and I both tend to be very light-handed with salt when cooking, so a lot of times, everyone at the table has to pass the salt-shaker around. It frequently does not occur to me to salt my food even if it is bland; I often wait for my dude to season his food, and then just copy him, because I honestly have such an underdeveloped palate I think. [The joke with the salt on the table for my brother in law was because the first time his mother came to visit my parents, Mom set the table all fancy and forgot to set the salt and pepper back on the table after she’d got the tablecloth and centerpiece all situated, and none of the rest of us noticed because we were used to our food being a little bit bland, but all the Southerners were eyeing one another and deciding if it would be rude to ask. None did, and when Mom finally heard the story, she was of course mortified. They were right there on the sideboard! She just hadn’t thought to put them back onto the table! So for seven years she gave my brother-in-law bags of exotic salts for Christmas, and at formal dinners marked his place with a wall made of every salt shaker she owned.]
The Assistant Livestock Manager likes to be able to taste the salt in everything she eats, to the point that Farmsister has given up refilling the decorative salt shaker, and has a jar of salt with a little spoon on it that she leaves on the back of the stove for ALM to avail herself of. It’s dead handy for cooking, though, so I admire this innovation.
I like spicy food, though, unlike my parents, who can’t tolerate even a little crushed red pepper sprinkled on their pizza. I don’t order the hot wings, but I order medium; I figure if your lips are chapped you should suffer a bit, but you don’t need to feel it the next day, if you know what i mean.
Anyway– what condiments live on your table?
