Horseradish is one of those perk-me-ups. You can use it in a cocktail sauce, you can bread fish with it - it loses its punch when cooked. It's a 'What is that?' flavor. It adds depth of flavor to things.
It's well worth making your own harissa, but there are some very good commercial varieties.
I have an obsession with hot sauce. I love Cholula. I put Cholula on everything.
Marmite is my little English touch, and I'm crazy for chutneys.
I have a zillion bottles of hot sauce. I love Trader Joe's jalapeno. The whole right side of my fridge is filled with hot sauce.
When you add just a little bit [of Tabasco] at the end, what you taste is the spectrum between the cooked chile flavor and the kind of nearly raw, just kind of fermented chile flavor at the end.
In London I had pear trees in my back garden, so I'd make my own pear and green tomato chutney.
I think Tabasco brings me pure heat and Southern kind of familiarity, along with the vinegar and the barrel-aged spices.
The only really good vegetable is Tabasco sauce. Put Tabasco sauce in everything. Tabasco sauce is to bachelor cooking what forgiveness is to sin. The next best vegetable is the jalapeno pepper. It has the virtue of turning salads into practical jokes.
Tabasco sauce is to bachelor cooking what forgiveness is to sin.
I love hot sauce. It can't be hot enough for me.
Chutney is marvelous. I'm mad about it. To me, it's very imperial.
