2024-10-24
Right in time for International Crisp Sandwich Day (St. Crispin's Day) tomorrow, I've taught myself to enjoy Pickled Onion Monster Munch.
There's a need for somebody... anybody... to eat Pickled Onion Monster Munch in our household, because we have a bit of an oversupply. In order to reliably get both of the other flavours that people like (Roast Beef and Flamin' Hot, respectively), we end up buying multipacks that also contain Pickled Onion flavour, and these unwanted extras pile up in the snack cupboard until we happen to have a houseguest that we can palm them off onto.
Now you might reasonably have assumed I'd have already enjoyed pickled onion crisps. After all, I not only enjoy actual pickled onions but also the far more "acquired taste" of pickled eggs.
But my entire life, I've claimed not to like pickled onion flavour crisps. As a kid, I would only eat salt & vinegar and ready salted flavours, eventually expanding my palate into "meaty" flavours like chicken and roast beef (although never, absolutely never, prawn cocktail). Later, I'd come to also enjoy cheese & onion and variants thereof, and it's from this that I realise that I'm probably being somewhat irrational.
Because if you think about it: if you want to make a "pickled onion" flavour crisp, what flavouring ingredients would you use? It turns out that most crisp manufacturers use a particular mixture of (a) the ingredient that makes salt & vinegar crisps taste "vinegary" and (b) the ingredient that makes cheese & onion crisps taste "onioney". So in summary:
1. I like pickled onions.
2. I like salt & vinegar crisps, which include an ingredient to make them taste vinegary.
3. I like cheese & onion crisps, which include an ingredient to make them taste onioney.
4. Therefore, I ought to like pickled onion crisps, which use two ingredients I like to try to emulate a food I like.
Maybe that deliberate and conscious thought process is all I need? Maybe that's it, and just having gone through the reasoning, I will now like pickled onion crisps!
Conveniently, I have a cupboard in my kitchen containing approximately one billion packets of Pickled Onion Monster Munch. So I tried them out and...
...it turns out they're okay!
They're not going to dethrone either of the other two flavours of Monster Munch that we routinely restock on, but at least now I'm in a position where I can do something about our oversupply.
And all it took was stopping to think rationally about it. If only everything were so simple.