The Condiment Packet Gallery

March 5, 2008 4:38 PM

"Gaze upon my packets, ye savory, and despair." -Saucymandias The Condiment Packet Gallery has hundreds of scanned condiment packets. You can view them by type, brand, or country of origin, or just view them all at once. (Via.)
posted by cog_nate (37 comments total)

Who else thought this post was going to be about IP packets?
posted by pombe at 4:42 PM on March 5, 2008 [2 favorites]

I love shit like this.
posted by roll truck roll at 4:45 PM on March 5, 2008

Fellow Americans I must tell you, brown sauce is the thinking man's ketchup.
posted by Tube at 4:47 PM on March 5, 2008

The internet is wonderful.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 4:48 PM on March 5, 2008

Chopped onion IS NOT A SAUCE
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 4:51 PM on March 5, 2008

Bonus: See how ketchup is (or was, anyway) made.
posted by cog_nate at 4:54 PM on March 5, 2008

I always suspected that someone was scrutinizing my outgoing packets.

**tears open MD20/20 packet with which to lubricate his paranoia.
posted by isopraxis at 4:55 PM on March 5, 2008

URGE TO SQUISH RISING
posted by loquacious at 5:01 PM on March 5, 2008 [2 favorites]

Oh man! Could not agree with you more, flapjax. I am a condiment hound here. Dang site has me drooling over what I am missing. While I hate buying full size to try out new condiments, I surely do it regularly, usually use it twice and then end up throwing them out if they have any dates on them which go past due. I really wonder why condiment manufacturers don't make it easier for us to try out their concoctions at other than fast food places?
posted by LiveLurker at 5:03 PM on March 5, 2008

It's odd for me to admit this, because who doesn't like sauce? MM-mm, sauce. But I have a distinct preference for portable sauce's portable companion and antidote, the moist towelette, as a collectible. If you've ever carried a moist towelette with an amusing graphic of a slot machine emblazoned across its foiled wrapper in your bag until it emerged, desicated and had to be discarded, you know the passion of which I speak. We are not alone.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 5:12 PM on March 5, 2008

Chopped onion IS NOT A SAUCE
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 4:51 PM on March 5

Not all condiments are sauces!
posted by ...possums at 5:14 PM on March 5, 2008

"NEWS
January 30, 2005"

Yeah, not so much.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 5:16 PM on March 5, 2008

Lord love a duck. And I thought I had too much time on my hands! Is bacon salt on there? I'm too overwhelmed to go through them all.

And I want to squish them, too. They need a flash game that lets you squish the ketchup and mustard and relish and mix them all around and fingerpaint...
posted by misha at 5:21 PM on March 5, 2008 [1 favorite]

They have condiments I've never even heard of. For example, the Repo Man-esque "brown sauce"? Wikipedia says it's basically a thick gravy. What sort of food would one put this on?

I had a friend in Jr. High whose father was the cheapest man alive. The family wasn't poor, he was just exceedingly stingy. Their bottom refrigerator drawer was basically this website: filled entirely with condiment packets of every description. They also washed and re-used plastic Dixie cups.
posted by DecemberBoy at 5:26 PM on March 5, 2008

Autoeponysterical.
posted by Saucy Intruder at 5:38 PM on March 5, 2008

Also, Dick Sauce?
posted by Saucy Intruder at 5:39 PM on March 5, 2008

...possums, I just read from the drop-down menu marked "sauce type". But now that you mention it, "lemon juice" is not a sauce either. Nor is "Amsterdam" a country.
I'll check my criticism now. It's a damn cool site.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:45 PM on March 5, 2008

"I had a friend in Jr. High whose father was the cheapest man alive. The family wasn't poor, he was just exceedingly stingy. Their bottom refrigerator drawer was basically this website: filled entirely with condiment packets of every description. They also washed and re-used plastic Dixie cups."

You must've run with the same crowd I did. I had a few friends whose parents were condiment-hoarders. The weirdest one was the guy who built his own little separators into the fridge drawers and filed the condiments alphabetically.

No shit. "A & W catsup" was in a different cubbyhole than "Burger King catsup", and God help you if you misfiled it.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 5:45 PM on March 5, 2008 [1 favorite]

The brown sauce, it intrigues me. Do I have to go to Ireland to partake of this condiment, though?
posted by yhbc at 6:01 PM on March 5, 2008

Shit bindings, that's some good condiment!
posted by subgear at 6:03 PM on March 5, 2008

Not only do I collect catsup packets and use them in lieu of buying bottles of catsup, I steal great handfuls of napkins for home use, too.

And I refill my beverage on my way out the door whether I'm thirsty or not.

And I am not ashamed.
posted by BitterOldPunk at 6:30 PM on March 5, 2008

You know, somebody made almost everything around us. Pens, ketchup packets, the tiny screws that hold my laptop together.

The internet is wonderful for these creators, because it means that these people who once labored in obscurity can now have their work cataloged by one devoted follower and shared with everyone in the world.
posted by JDHarper at 6:39 PM on March 5, 2008

They have condiments I've never even heard of. For example, the Repo Man-esque "brown sauce"? Wikipedia says it's basically a thick gravy. What sort of food would one put this on?

Wrong brown sauce entry. The brown sauce condiment is this sort of thing. Mmm HP. Good on virtually anything.
posted by CKmtl at 6:40 PM on March 5, 2008

These are nice, but I've always thought sugar packets had the best art. Maybe it's because they're made of paper and so the design ideas go back long before plastic/mylar-ish shiny heat-sealed packaging.
posted by Miko at 6:42 PM on March 5, 2008 [1 favorite]

Oh Yes! CKmtl, HP does indeed rule. It looks just like the label on the jar.
posted by tellurian at 6:51 PM on March 5, 2008

Cool, Miko. I swear I saw the presidential sugar packets somewhere as a kid.

Does anyone know why Taco Bell's Fire Sauce has soy sauce as an ingredient? For umami-ness, maybe?
posted by cog_nate at 7:01 PM on March 5, 2008

I love how McDonald's hasn't changed their preserves packet design since 1990. It's the same design I remember as a child, so I expect the general form goes even further back.
posted by jedicus at 7:37 PM on March 5, 2008

Every once in a while something reaffirms my faith in the world. This is one of those things.
posted by dirtdirt at 7:59 PM on March 5, 2008

Fantastic.
posted by chococat at 8:21 PM on March 5, 2008

I was going to say how many Taco Bell packet sayings he missed, and then I noticed the January, 2005 date on the "NEWS" item as well.

Poor guy's missed a LOT of packets over the past three years.
posted by yhbc at 8:25 PM on March 5, 2008

So the next step, I hear, is sampler packs of select condiments as shown by color, use or country of origin?

oh I hope, I hope, I do hopes!
posted by Sam.Burdick at 9:11 PM on March 5, 2008

Do they answer last century's most pressing question, e.g. what exactly is "fancy" about fast-food ketchup?

(This century's most pressing question, for those of you wondering, is how is one supposed to apply a Whataburger ketchup tub to one's non-fries.)
posted by JHarris at 11:44 PM on March 5, 2008

Any packet, or really any other food product with the brand name Souther Tsunami is a big 'no no' in my book of gastrologic stability.
posted by ZaneJ. at 2:24 AM on March 6, 2008

Brilliant!

I'm genuinely saddened by the ignorance of brown sauce shown above: a life without it is not worth living! (I have to actively resist the urge to punch people who put tomato ketchup anywhere near a cooked breakfast, and even have a couple of bottles of HP laid down from the Aston factory, before Heinz shamefully shifted production to the Netherlands. Actually, they're from before they stopped brewing vinegar on site, but admitting that in public might make me sound a bit peculiar. Oops.)

If anyone pops up to say that they are a stranger to that other great brown condiment of the West Midlands, the Worcestershire Sauce made by Lea & Perrins, I shall weep.
posted by jack_mo at 11:04 AM on March 6, 2008

Wur-sess-tur-shy-ur

[/purposefully annoying the Brits]
posted by CKmtl at 11:12 AM on March 6, 2008

You know, I was actually planning my first ever FPP about condiments, and then you had to take my idea. :-p

Also, check out the condimentometer, a short play from Chicago-based experimental theater group Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind.
posted by mismatched at 12:23 PM on March 6, 2008

admitting that in public might make me sound a bit peculiar.

That's ok. We already think you're peculiar. Do carry on!

Just keep your damn limey hands off my catsup - THAT WHICH I PUT ON MY RUNNY FRIED "SUNNY SIDE UP" EGGS AND CRISPY HASHED AND BROWNED POTATOS WHICH IS A COOKED BREAKFAST AND SOMETIMES EVEN A DINNER - or so help me and my great American God I'll use my state-issued welfare nuke to wipe you and every trace of your genetic legacy from the face of time and space itself.

What? You didn't know that they issued us personal nukes? Why do you think all of our tourists are so damn rude?
posted by loquacious at 12:19 AM on March 7, 2008