Mackie’s of Scotland Boxing Day Curry Festive Flavour

This was a Christmas present from relations who don’t have lots of money to spare, but who pay attention to my interests and have noticed that I write a blog about crisps. So, a present which has genuinely been thought about. Well done and thank you!

Lordy, I am so fed up with people who have known me my entire life and still choose to give me trout roulade for my birthday (I don’t eat fish), or tea in a fancy container (I don’t drink tea). They give me silver jewellery but I probably won’t wear it (I am allergic to silver). They give me exciting packets of pistachios bought on a mini-break in Turkey but I won’t eat them (I really really don’t like pistachios). Oh, and someone visited to a well known chocolate shop in Le Touquet-Paris-Plage and bought me a jar of apricot jam: that’s just mean. All genuine incidents.

OK, enough of presents I didn’t want, and you might not either, and back to this crisp flavour: is Boxing Day* curry a thing? I come from a very small family so we never had a turkey at Christmas because it was just too huge. So we never had masses of leftovers, and never felt the need to make a curry. But tv shows and commercials assure me that everyone else in the universe has a huge turkey and a ham at Christmas and despite cramming 16 relatives round a too small table, they still have leftovers to eat up the next day.

Hmm… perhaps a Boxing Day curry really is a thing. 

And although these tasty crisps do have a genuine taste of curry, there is also (to me anyhow) a big hit of raisins or sultanas. Which made me think of retro curries from the 1970s. This is interesting because the list of ingredients includes fenugreek, coriander seed, turmeric, cardamom, and ginger, there’s nothing that leaps out that might give a flavour of sultanas. Those food scientists eh? Obviously they know a whole lot more about flavour than I do.

*For those of you not in the know, Boxing Day is the day after Christmas Day in Britain. In what we call “the olden days” (when we aren’t sure exactly when we mean but it was a long time ago), employees or tradesmen who delivered milk or coal would visit their employer on the day after Christmas to collect their Christmas box. A sort of tip.