I know what it is like to have no context for a certain flavour, to just not "get" it, and maybe even intensely dislike it. I've wanted to like root beer and all the variants since I came to the USA fifteen years ago, but I simply don't like it. We didn't have root beer in Ireland growing up (though I vaguely remember it being in McDonald's on Grafton Street in the mid-70s, soon to disappear from the menus. However perhaps my memory is playing tricks on me, because McDonald's doesn't carry root beer in the US, at least none of the ones I've been in, largely on the East Coast). I've wanted to like it too, and I'll regularly try it if a friend has some, and I keep thinking perhaps one of the "fancier" brands - e.g. Boylan's - may do the trick. But it never works - it always just tastes like sweet muscle rub to me.
I mention root beer, because most - though not all - of my American friends can't abide
Marmite. I always have a jar of this in the larder - not that I eat it every day, but when I have a craving I need to get my fix. My favourite way to eat it is the simplest: just spread thinly on hot buttered toast. It is so tasty, the warm butter and Marmite are a delightful combination. I think it always needs a little butter - a very vivid food memory of mine is eating cheddar cheese sandwiches made with Irish brown bread and butter and Marmite whilst fishing at
Howth pier in Dublin way back in the mid-to-late 70s.
So, what does it taste like? It is an intensely salty morsel. I think the closest thing I can think of for the taste of straight Marmite is the very sticky bits of meat juice from a well-seasoned piece of beef on the bottom of a baking pan, the bits you loosen with wine and scrap up to help flavour a pan gravy. You have to eat it in moderation, just a thin scraping will do - any more is overpowering. Marmite, which is essentially a yeast extract with salt and other flavouring added, is loaded with B vitamins. I remember it regularly being used, for flavour and nutrients, in veggie nut loaves and the like back in my vegetarian days in the 1980s.
I urge you to try it! Marmite on hot buttered toast actually tastes a lot like a nicely caramelized steak (the sweet butterfat cuts the saltiness and rounds everything out nicely, and there's a rich meaty flavour). That's what I told
Nolan, who's 8, this morning, so he tried a small morsel of my toast. He was quick to agree and even came up with the idea of adding it to a cheddar cheese sandwich all on his own (I use butter as a default spread on all sandwiches in this house, not mayonnaise. Have I mentioned I hate mayo?). I'm going to chalk this up to a small victory of spreading the good word about this delicious spread, and hopefully add another lifelong Marmite lover to the roster!
