Cutting the Mustard

Ah! English mustard. What better accompaniment to a slice of roast beef could there be than a lovely dab of English mustard?

Not just roast beef but also a smidgin of it smeared on the surface of a steak, too.

A curious side effect is that a tiny portion on the tip of a teaspoon added to your cheese sauce will bring out the taste of the cheese beautifully without the sauce tasting of the mustard. Odd, but true. Sometimes the littlest can be the best!

Quote: “They make the littlest chicken sandwiches, the littlest.” Walter Matthau in ‘Charade’ to Audrey Hepburn.

But who is it that makes the best English mustard? There can be only one name here – ‘Colman’. ‘Colman’s English Mustard’ is renowned Worldwide as the only mustard worth putting on your beef or steak.

I just had an egg sandwich with mayonnaise that had the slightest dash of ‘Colman’s Mustard’ mustard in it. Piquant. Superb.

 The thing is, we take excessive amounts of it. It is a fact. Indeed, even Jeremiah James Colman was asked how he had made such a vast fortune from the sale of mustard, he replied, “I make my money from the mustard that people throw away on the sides of their plate.”

This is a universal truth.

We take too much.

Watch people at a fixed price buffet lunch or, even better, at a free buffet lunch and see how much they can pack on a plate. Now observe how much remains on the plate after they have finished.

A lot.

People are greedy. Colman banked on people doing just that.

Have you ever tried to see how much soap powder you actually need to wash your clothes?

Do you automatically fill the measuring scoop with absolute faith in the manufacturer’s knowing best?

They have calculated how much they can let you have for the price given but allowing for the fact that after a specified number of washes you will need to buy a new pack of soap.

The same, quite naturally, goes for dishwasher liquid. I have discovered that I can get more washes from a bottle of liquid by only using three quarters of the amount each time and guess what? The plates are just as clean as they were when I filled the container.

We are convinced that we should use more so that the makers can sell their product more frequently.

It’s not just soap and mustard but toothpaste as well. See the adverts where they load an enormous amount of paste on to a brush. Are they cleaning the teeth of a Great White Shark? A fraction of that is perfectly adequate.

The advertisements convince you that ‘more is better’ – better for them, of course.

Often I see advertisements in shops or a salesman will tell me that there is a special price just for me. Actually, it is more likely to be a special price for them. They are anxious for you to empty your wallet in the shortest time possible into their cash register.

A young lady of my acquaintance once told me she had saved fifty pounds buying a coat. It was, admittedly, a lovely coat. I asked her how much the coat had cost her; she told me it was one hundred and fifty pounds.

I asked her to give me the fifty she had saved so that I could bank it in. She looked at me with a blank expression. It fell to me to explain that she had not saved fifty pounds at all – she had spent one hundred and fifty pounds that she actually did not have, she had borrowed it from the credit card company.

Advertisers and retailers are cunning. They know the tricks. They know that marking a price as nine pounds and ninety-nine pence will cause women in particular to think of the price as being nine pounds and not as ten pounds less one penny!

Colman was wise to this. That is why his product is hot stuff – he knew how to cut the mustard.