What do you put on your French Fries?...

Either catsup or gravy.

Depends where I get them. I generally like gooey toppings (Animal Style from In N Out, carne asada fries, chili cheese, pizza, etc).

ketchup on the side for dippin'

Now you are talking!

Gravy is the best. Even McDonalds is selling it now as Gravy Loaded fries.

Aioli sometimes, if it isn't too sharp. Mayo also.

Tomato sauce (not American ketchup, too sweet).

If the fish and chips comes with lemon slices I might squeeze the lemon juice over the chips, depending on how strong the fish is and whether it needs flavour modification.

I also think bbq sauce gets overlooked. That goes great on fries as well.

That doesn't appeal to me much. Though I like ranch but not on fries. Some people picked Mayo on the poll which I find somewhat disturbing

A wombat after my own heart, a connoisseur of sauces. I'm married to a Scot, and one of the great things about Europeans is that they love sauces. Try mayonnaise mixed with a little fresh lemon or lime juice as an accompaniment to salmon, as the French do (they also use it on their "frites," which is what the French call French fries, because they're not French, they're Belgian, and even then they were unknown until the 16th century because they're originally from Peru.)

Portland organic catsup is perfection. (Available at Costco.) it's much lower in salt and sugar than other catsup, but it has more flavor. "What sorcery is this?" I hear you snarl. But it's true. It tastes the way tomato catsup should taste, you just don't know it until you taste it. It's not what I call regular (Heinz) catsup; "tomato syrup." It tastes like the catsup your grandma would have made, if she had made catsup, which she didn't. Plus it's organic. The weird thing is that we only use about an eighth of the amount of catsup we used to, and enjoy it far more.

By the way, tomato catsup has only been around for a little over a century. "Catsup" (or "ketchup") is an English bastardization of a Chinese word for a sauce they made from fermented mushrooms. That version dates back to prehistory. Nobody knows how many thousands of years it's been around. Catsup is the oldest sauce known to mankind, even older than "Garum," a sauce the ancient Roman's made from fermented fish guts. (Yum!)

The thing that tomatoes, mushrooms and fish all have in common is "Umami," the sixth sense (literally) of taste.


Umami is derived from glutamates, the best known of which is MSG (monosodium glutamate).

MSG IS HARMLESS.


All mammals (and other species with muscle tissues) actually contain glutamates. OUR BODIES PRODUCE GLUTAMATES. (That's the main reason they taste good, y'know.) The fear of MSG came from a single letter to an obscure long-defunct medical journal in the 1960s. The original fake news.