Whipping up trade: Ice-cream parlour serving ketchup, mushy peas and Marmiteflavoured cones

STROLL along a seaside promenade in Kent this summer and you might encounter ketchup ice-cream.

At Makcari’s in Herne Bay, the condiment otherwise reserved for chips and other savoury dishes has been turned into pudding.

Maker Nejmi Hassan is all for unlikely concoctions when crafting his ice-cream.

At the parlour, which has been going since 1931, you’ll also find an ice-cream flavoured with mushy peas, and another with Marmite. The latter, we can only assume, is a love or hate type of affair.

Nejmi hopes his odd twists prove the “taste of the summer”. But he concedes too that the flavours are also for “acquired tastes”. After all, he’s mixing peas with double cream and Marmite with milky sweetness.

Nejmi churns ketchup into his red sauce blend and serves it with a sachet of Heinz — as if in a train station café or a fish and chip shop.

His mushy peas ice-cream comes with a green swirl running throughout, and his Marmite cones are served with a slice of toast.

“They’re an acquired taste,” the ice-cream maker said.

“We hope to introduce a new flavour every month. We had them for sale over the weekend just gone, but we gave most of it away.

“I’m not saying because they tasted nice, but people were intrigued by ketchup and mushy pea-flavoured ice-cream.”