Posted to News on 14th Oct 2012, 00:00
Cucumber, side salads and innovative functionality...
I was never one of those people who understood the raison d'être of the side salad, or who was able to fathom any useful role for cucumber. Now, don't get me wrong, I like a salad as much as the next man. Give me a chicken caesar or a tuna nicoise and I'm a happy boy. But in both those cases the salad is a properly integrated component of the dish rather than an afterthought, and that's always been the nub of the issue for me. If the salad is supposed to be part of the dish, then make it part of the dish. If it isn't, then it isn't. In neither case is a small bowl of lettuce, cucumber and grated carrot required on the side. It smacks of nothing but a thinly disguised ploy to get me to pay more for a meal.
>Cucumber is a particular bone of contention in the Simms household, with the lady of the house favouring it as an addition to sandwiches. To my mind, slice a cucumber into a cheese sandwich and put it in your lunchbox, and come lunch time all you'll have is soggy bread. Of course the same could be said of tomato, but at least that tastes of something. Cucumber is merely lightly flavoured water in a less than palatable container.
>As I hinted at the outset, however, my opinion has changed recently. It happened one evening when I was tempted by a local restauranteur to partake of his piri piri chicken. Yes it would be hot, he warned me, but it was surely a fine dish. And was it hot? Well, let me tell you that three bites in my mouth was on fire. I could have breathed flames across the table and sent young children running, screaming for their lives. This was clearly too hot for me, and I should have given up there and then, but as ever I figured a stubborn, pig-headed refusal to look the facts in the face would see me through. Long before the half way stage, I had finished all the water on the table, and had deftly stolen gulps of fizzy pop from under the eyes of my unsympathetic children. The redoubtable Mrs Simms was keeping a tight grasp of her temptingly refreshing crisp white, so the only thing left to sooth my burning mouth was the side salad. With no other option left to me, I popped in a slice of cucumber. And oh, the relief. Never again will I question the value of a side salad. I may only need it very occasionally, but just knowing it's there is something I find immensely reassuring. If only someone had explained to me all those years ago what role a side salad might one day play, I could have spent significantly less of my life ranting.
>I bring all this up because it struck me that there are many manufacturers who add interesting sounding functions to their products whose usefulness is not immediately obvious. Many of us may wonder if it's simply a ploy to make us pay more. So I would say this to those manufacturers: make sure you explain those features and functions properly, because the day will undoubtedly come when we need them. And when that day does come, we'll certainly thank you that they're there.
Mark Simms, 14 October 2012
