Heinz

Salad cream is more than a poor man’s mayonnaise

Salad cream makes me feel oddly patriotic. It’s one of those products that is so distinctively British that it has not travelled. Elsewhere, it is eschewed as a poor man’s mayonnaise. Its chief ingredients are hardboiled egg yolks, English mustard, vinegar and thick cream, and it was, in fact, the first product that Heinz produced exclusively for Great Britain, in Harlesden, north-west London, from 1914 onwards. The Heinz version is, frankly, a wartime mayonnaise, constrained by shelf life and made with the cheaper ingredients available at the time, a little looser and distinctively sweeter than its mayonnaise equivalent. It really came into its own in the second world war during