Salad cream

The double-edged sword of eating with the seasons is the glut. A blunt, un-pretty word, which is a joy in theory and delicious in result, but which can feel daunting when you’re facing down a bench full of berries to be picked over, or countless apples to be processed. My husband and I were once given an apple tree as a present. It’s a multi-graft, meaning each of the three branches produces a different type of apple: russets, for storing, bramleys, for cooking, and tart eating apples. This is the first year that it’s thrown up more than three measly apples. Well, it’s made up for lost time; we are,

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