Name: Hellmann’s mayonnaise.
Age: Depends on the regularity of your fridge turnover.
Appearance: White. Possibly with yellow crust, depending on said regularity of your fridge turnover.
Why is Hellmann’s mayonnaise in the news? It’s not a sex thing, is it? Tell me it’s not a sex thing … What it must be like to live inside your head. No, it’s not a sex thing. It’s a Tory v Lib Dem thing.
What? Is it 2010 again? Are we in the rose garden? No. Nick Clegg’s wife Miriam González Durántez has published a book of recipes and reminiscences about the coalition years, hosting and being guests at dinners with the Camerons and Osbornes.
Ah. I see. Did she once mistake George O for a quivering blob of the ovular condiment and try to stick a spoon in him? No. Though she did once refuse to cook for him when he came for dinner after, it was suspected, briefing against Nick. She took their sons out for a meal and left the chancellor and her husband to order a Thai takeaway.
Brava! Did the Cameron dinners go equally well? Absolutely not. She was Spanish-for-aghast when Sam Cam held a getting-to-know-you lunch that comprised roast chicken on a board with some Maldon sea salt and some Hellmann’s mayonnaise.
It’s probably “aghasto”. What?
Spanish for “aghast”. ’Kay, thanks for that. Meanwhile, Miriam concludes, “Now I’ve spent years observing how grand people live, I’ve learned that the ultimate grand person’s food, found on all the most upper-class tables, is not caviar, truffles, virgin olive oil or fancy cheese. No, it is … Hellmann’s mayonnaise.”
Well, duh. Real poshos never do what you think they’re going to do. That’s how they prove they’re real poshos. She should have hit back with some Real Spaniarding. She did. She would prepare pimientos de Padrón and threaten to serve the cripplingly hot ones to all the guests she least liked.
That’s more like it. What else? She once cooked a whole sea bass using a Spanish recipe for the Camerons. “I forgot,” she writes sweetly, “that most English people are not used to eating fish with bones. It was definitely not a pretty scene.”
Do say: “Nothing was, 2010-2015, querida, nothing was.”
Don’t say: “I hope nobody ever introduces her to salad cream.”
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