I scream for mayo icecream

No one is ‘‘meh’’ on mayonnaise, the most contentious condiment. You either want it smothered over your potato salad, spread on your sandwich bread, put in your coleslaw and devilled eggs, and everything else, or you want to invent a time machine so you can go back to 1756 to thwart the Duke de Richelieu’s chef who was said to have invented the sauce in his boss’ honour that year.

If you fall into the former camp there’s good news. There is mayonnaise-flavoured icecream now.

The blessed/wretched flavour is the work of Ice, an icecream shop in Falkirk, Scotland. It’s known for other wacky flavours, including Monster Energy Drink and Strongbow cider.

It’s probably not even the weirdest icecream flavour out there. There is squid ink icecream (Travel & Leisure dubbed it ‘‘surprisingly delicious’’) and a Delaware icecream shop in the United States sells ghost pepper icecream, for which you have to sign a waiver before you eat it.

You’ll find lobster icecream in Maine, and Cheetos soft-serve in New York. An Irish icecream shop made tomato sauceflavoured icecream as a weird tribute to singer Ed Sheeran.

Foie gras icecream has popped up in a number of fancy restaurants. And let us not forget the scandal about breast milk icecream, also from a British company.

By comparison, mayo icecream seems relatively bland. And it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that in the escalating arms race within the world of weird icecream flavours, mayonnaise would eventually get its turn, especially in the United Kingdom: they really love their mayo. The condiment outsells ketchup.

There’s also salad cream, which is a slightly thinner and less eggy version of mayonnaise, and is a traditional bottled condiment in Great Britain. And, potentially, the next big frozen treat.

What’s next: beans on toast icecream? Blood sausage icecream? HP Sauce icecream?

Then again, it’s probably not as bad as it sounds. Semisavoury icecreams can be great – ever tried olive oil icecream? – and here, the context is everything.

If it had been called aioli icecream, and presented as part of a 17-course tasting menu at a molecular gastronomy restaurant, chefs would probably be praised for their creativity.

Instead, it’s gone viral on Twitter with a picture of a squeeze bottle of Hellman’s plunked in there, which is part of the reason it’s giving people such a visceral reaction.

– Washington Post