You could be forgiven for not thinking about relish.

🪩

No brand in the relish aisle has given anyone a reason to pay attention since 1975.

A suspicious-minded cook might assume big relish was actively trying to keep a lid on things. Simplify. Lull us into thinking some increasingly bright green slurry is synonymous with relish. Is relish.

It isn't.

Well, it's more appropriate to say kind of relish.

You see, relish is a category. There used to be lots of them, before we 'somehow' 👀 slowly slid into sacrificing variety for a monodimensional third-string condiment.

But you don't need to buy into the conspiracy to understand how we've lost it. Times are hectic. Shifts are coming at us fast, and all at once. The computers in our pockets are more powerful than the ones that went up in the first space shuttles, and clicking them feels as good or better than pulling a jackpot slot machine high on oxygen, cocktails, fake sky, and crispy AC on a hot day in Vegas.

But the relish aisle is waking up.

Somewhat ironically for a category that has rendered itself ignorable, relish is also a verb that means to notice • savor • enjoy.

6 ways to relish our relish.
If his is your first time learning about this subject, you may want to pace yourself, because we're busting inception levels here:

Most of our relish is red pepper relish. 

You are not a fool for thinking relish is, by definition, cut-up pickled cucumbers. The people who tried to keep the truth from you are the fools for thinking the ruse could last.

Ready for the next one?

It's not just a condiment.

And we want to be careful about the word "just" here–we needed something more impactful than "only," but we don't want to send a sliver of the sense that a condiment can't be a life-changing experience.

You understand, we can't legally promise it will, but there's more than a non-zero chance that it can as well.

This stuff is also a combinator. 

People like Martha Stewart know it's a boss-level hack for sneaking flavour into a method for keeping a turkey burger together.

IYKYK.

Finally, it's a dimensionalizer. 

The jar doesn't replace ingredients. It makes them taste more like themselves. Their best selves.

Sweep a spoonful through pan drippings. Glaze a salmon in the last five minutes on the grill. Stir a quarter cup into a sausage ragu and watch the whole pot lean toward something you didn't realize was on the stove.

To be clear, we didn't engineer this on purpose. It just turns out a jar of peppers, vinegar, sugar, and time is uniquely good at the kind of work most of the condiment aisle doesn't try for.

So that's the shape of it. Condiment, Combinator, Cookery. Six profiles, one job. (We'll get to the profiles in a minute, but we wanted you to know the offer before the names start flying.)

You can keep not thinking about relish. That's an entirely defensible position. We're just letting you know there's now a jar—six, actually—that earned the thinking.