Condiment trays -- and I mean that in the metaphorical sense -- seem to vary widely from culture to culture, but there are themes that can be teased out. Let's take an American diner: on the table are predictably salt, pre-ground black pepper, tomato catsup, and a bottle of Louisiana chili sauce. The chili sauce is the most variable -- Tabasco brand is dominant, but others abound. Now go to a highway rest stop in Germany, and the salt and pepper are both still there, but the chili sauce has been replaced by a bottle of Maggiwürze, a lightly fermented, Nestlé-branded sauce that tastes mostly of salt and monosodium glutamate. And there's no tomato catsup at the rest stop. A Taipei breakfast stall might have red vinegar, sweet soy sauce, and a tub of chili and garlic macerated in oil. I've noticed that Belgian bistrots tend toward a mustard pot, sausage stands might include sauerkraut, and Vietnamese bun- or mi houses add pickled spring garlic.
The condiment tray also varies by the food on offer at a particularly venue. Fish and chips inevitably evoke vinegar, sometimes made from sour beer, usually colored to look like it's made from sour beer and called malt vinegar to boot. (This in spite of the fact that cider vinegar, which is about the same color and made from apple cider, is usually a better addition to fish and chips.)
The sauces in some fast-food restaurants are legion, and they are almost always branded. I recently counted two kinds of barbecue sauce (this is a catch-all term, but here refers to a thickened, sweet kind of tomato catsup, heavy with molasses flavor and smoke), a mayonnaise (a preserved egg emulsion that tastes of canola oil and neutral vinegar -- not much like a sauce mayonnaise at all, but along the same gastronomic axis), a hot sauce (labelled just that), tomato catsup, mustard, a sweetened cucumber relish, and tartar sauce. Tartar sauce is particularly interesting, because it is a compound condiment, being made from two of the aforementioned: sweet pickle relish and mayonnaise.
My own dream condiment tray would skip the black pepper. It's a fine flavor, and I use it in the kitchen all the time, but it doesn't need to be on the table. I would include one kind of fish sauce, as do a lot of restaurants. The most popular is Lee and Perrin's worcestershire sauce, an anchovy reduction redolent of molasses but still with nam pla fishiness. And there would be three forms of chili: one ground up with garlic in oil, one in the Tabasco mold (Sriracha and Cholula brands are good, and they are both a bit cheaper than the Louisiana sauces), and plain dried chillies in powder (our local chili farm has been providing rocoto, which is vigorous). We sometimes have two sizes of salt on the table, fine-ground and flake. They suit different dishes, and I like them in salts rather than in shakers.
Some of the necessary condiments keep well in bottles or jars on the tray: soy sauce can last for weeks, fish sauce for a while, and strong vinegar and salt almost indefinitely. Curry ketchup, a central European invention that I happen to like, needs to stay in the fridge except at mealtimes. The same goes for most mustards and mayonnaises -- even the ones full of stabilizers. Some condiments really need to be fresh ingredients: you can't keep grated ginger, wasabi needs to be made up fresh, and I've never met a pot of ground horseradish that kept its much more than an hour, although you can buy some that is sealed in jars with ample vinegar, and these will give you a week from opening. I've gone back and forth on mango pickle, but by and large it's a must for the discerning diner's condiment collection. Red rice vinegar is good, a pretty color, and variable -- but helpful in a pinch for fish and chips. As for soy sauces, there are so many kinds that I think it would just take two to banish Maggiwürze, although I appreciate that MSG needs a way to get to the table.
More ideas: sansho powder (Sichuan peppercorns); a late-eighteenth century nutmeg grater containing more modern nutmegs; dried minced garlic; black sesame seeds.
The conclusion on restaurant condiment trays is that the size of the condiment tray is inversely proportional to the size of the restaurant's snootiness -- down to a point. A country diner might have what amounts to a salad bar (remember from earlier reading that "salad" is one of the vaguest of all words in English culinary vocabulary). Alongside the beet-colored horseradish are habanero sauce and malt vinegar, diced onions and Major Grey's chutney, two kinds of barbecue sauce, dried shrimp powder, and coarse-ground mustard. The biggest of the hamburger chains seem to get away with less -- often just salt, pepper, and tomato catsup. But as you go up the price ladder, even the salt cellar disappears. The presumption being, I suppose, that you're paying all this money for a celebrity chef to concoct your pavé of pulled pike-perch with rutabaga coulis, so why would you consider yourself capable of altering its flavors?
Which is why I go to restaurants with a vial of ground serrano chillies in my pocket.
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