Mayonnaise-flavored ice cream is here

No one is “meh” on mayonnaise, the most contentious condiment. You either want it glopped all over your potato salad or you want to invent a time machine so you can go back to 1756 to thwart the chef of the Duke de Richelieu, who was said to have invented the sauce in his boss’s honor.

If you fall into the former camp: Good news! There is mayonnaise-flavored ice cream now. If you fall into the latter camp: I wish you the best of luck carrying on with your life knowing that you live in a world where there is mayo-flavored ice cream.

The blessed/wretched flavor is the work of Ice, an ice cream shop in Falkirk, Scotland. It’s known for other wacky flavors, including Monster Energy Drink and Strongbow cider.

It’s probably not even the weirdest ice cream flavor out there. There is squid ink ice cream (Travel & Leisure dubbed it “delicious”). A Delaware ice cream shop sells ghost pepper ice cream, and you have to sign a waiver before you can eat it. You’ll find lobster ice cream in Maine, and Cheetos soft-serve in New York. An Irish ice cream shop made ketchup-flavored ice cream as some kind of weird tribute to the singer Ed Sheeran. Foie gras ice cream has popped up in a number of fancy restaurants.

So, by comparison, mayo ice cream seems relatively bland. And it shouldn’t be too big of a surprise that in the escalating arms race within the world of weird ice cream flavors, mayonnaise would eventually get its turn. Especially in the United Kingdom: They really love their mayo over there. The condiment outsells ketchup. There’s also salad cream, which is a slightly thinner and less eggy version of mayonnaise, and is a traditional bottled condiment in Great Britain.

What’s next: Beans on toast ice cream? HP Sauce ice cream? But this is a glass house at which we, the nation that invented the KFC Double Down, should not throw stones.

Besides, it’s probably not as bad as it sounds. Semi-savory ice creams can be great — ever tried olive oil ice cream? — and here, the context is everything. If it had been called aioli ice cream, and presented as part of a 17-course tasting menu at a molecular gastronomy restaurant, the chef would probably be praised for his creativity. Instead, it’s gone viral on Twitter with a picture of a squeeze bottle of Hellman’s.