Saucing things up with undervalued ketchup
Classic condiment may not get much respect, but the kids’ fave livens up many an adult dinner
Like many people, I grew up on ketchup. I smeared it on eggs, puddled it next to potatoes and glazed frozen chicken patties with the stuff.
But as I crossed over to adulthood, I got a sense that requesting ketchup at restaurants suggested something about me beyond my preferred sauce. Coming from a working-class background, I didn’t want to broadcast my blue-collar roots every time I ordered fries. I mean, frites.
Despite its down-market reputation, ketchup is ubiquitous and has been for a very long time — certainly since Heinz patented its first bottle in 1882.
Scholars and food historians contest the exact origin of ketchup. Eighteenth-century condiments with names such as kecap (Indonesia) and ke-tsiap (China) suggest that the earliest ketchups were concocted in Asia. From there, the sauce travelled to Europe before evolving into its current form here. Common early versions were made with fermented mushrooms or walnuts and their pickling liquid, along with a slew of spices. Oyster, liver and lobster were other main ingredients. Pungent, dark and thin, the first ketchups were decidedly not sweet. Early recipes were created with the goal of a long shelf life. Some recipes had titles like Ketchup to Keep 20 Years. Food companies standardized the iconic condiment that’s in almost every refrigerator today. They, too, were driven by the goal of a long-lasting product. That’s how ketchup got so sweet and thick — sugar is a natural preservative.
By the 1890s, the New York Tribune declared tomato ketchup the national condiment of the United States.
But it wasn’t the sauce’s storied history that revived my long-dormant love. It was my four-yearold niece. She doesn’t know that ketchup isn’t cool.
During one visit this year, we ate tater tots and ketchup together, her glee unbridled, the reapplications of ketchup to her plate and mine numerous.
A longtime favourite restaurant dish of mine — the deep-fried sweet and spicy Cauliflower 65 — often includes ketchup.
I ate this dish dozens of times without realizing the tomatobased condiment played a central role in its seasoning. Usually described as IndianChinese fusion, it’s the kind of Westernized dish whose origins and “authentic” recipe are unclear, so I used a recipe from the V Street cookbook by Rich Landau and Kate Jacoby as my starting point.
Ketchup is often the key ingredient in another classic sauce that is currently out of style: mayonnaisebased Russian dressing. Spicier than its sibling, Thousand Island, thanks to the addition of sinus-tingling horseradish, Russian dressing can be made well without any mayonnaise at all (my version subs tofu for the mayo), but you can’t get precisely the right tang for a Reuben sandwich without a healthy dose of the red stuff.
A recent dinner I attended featured a group of chefs each cooking a dish to represent their heritage. Chef Andrew Wood, known for his obsessive local sourcing at Russet in Philadelphia, brushed his buttery, ketchup-forward sauce on the chicken he was grilling that night.
His dish paid tribute to the summer barbecues his family shared when he was growing up. Most good recipes for barbecue sauce are little more than gussiedup ketchup, and Wood’s vintage sauce recipe comes straight off the Heinz labels of the late 1970s. When I asked him, surprised, about the Heinz, he said, “You can’t make this without it.” Although ketchup is an indispensable ingredient for a number of classic dishes, it shouldn’t need to hide in a recipe to be celebrated. If ketchup were introduced today, we would hail it as the next “it” condiment. It’s time to cook with it, as well as slather it on potatoes, eggs, onion rings, meat loaf or wherever you like it best — and do it proudly.