The Man Who Ate Everything (12 page)

*For a more comprehensive discussion of fries, please refer to the chapter of that name in Part Five.

My third task was to solve, once and for all, the ketchup pourability problem. During the precompetition experiment, I was largely ignorant of the contribution that the science of rheology can make to our everyday lives. It was only after I had sent a stream of ketchup streaking across my wife’s favorite tablecloth, a lovely hand-printed Indian cotton from a shop on the rue Jacob, that I telephoned Professor Malcolm Bourne at Cornell for a lesson in non-Newtonian fluids. Sir Isaac Newton wrote the laws governing liquids that flow like water: the more force you exert on them, the faster they flow. But ketchup is different. Composed of tangled red tomato fibers suspended in a sweet and acidic colorless serum, ketchup behaves like a solid both at rest and under low levels of pressure: but then, at some higher threshold, it suddenly begins flowing like an ordinary fluid. That’s why the frustrated ketchup lover who loses patience with gentle taps on the bottle’s bottom and prematurely shifts to a powerful wallop ends up with a gush of ketchup over everything. Ketchup and mayonnaise are known as Bingham fluids, named after the scientist who characterized them early in this century.

Professor Bourne has these suggestions: Any ketchup in the neck of the bottle has probably dried out and partially solidified; remove the cap and stir the top half inch of ketchup into the rest with the point of a knife. Then, after replacing the cap, violently agitate the whole bottle vertically, like a cocktail shaker: this should decrease the degree of entanglement among the tomato fibers and line them up in the hoped-for direction of flow. Finally, remove the cap again and invert the bottle over your fries or hamburger. Begin tapping the bottom gently, gradually increasing the force of each tap until the ketchup begins to flow at just the right rate. If this doesn’t work, go out and buy a plastic squeeze bottle, introduced by Heinz in 1983 and made recyclable in 1991.

Just before the Festival of Ketchups was to begin, I decided to add two homemade ketchups to my collection of thirty-three store-bought and mail-order specimens. For the first, I was determined to track down and replicate the first ketchup ever eaten. And for the second, I wanted to create a good, honest ketchup from the ground up.

Where did ketchup get its start? The most popular theory is that the word itself derives from
koe-chiap
or
ke-tsiap
in the Amoy dialect of China, where it meant the brine of pickled fish or shellfish. Some people prefer the Malaysian word
ketchap
(spelled
ket-jap
by the Dutch), which may have come from the Chinese in the first place. In either case, sometime in the late seventeenth century, the name (and perhaps some samples and a recipe or two) arrived in England, where it first appeared in print as “catchup” in 1690 and then as “ketchup” in 1711, at least according to the
Oxford English Dictionary.
These exotic Asian names struck an evocative chord among the British, who quickly appropriated the names for their own pickled anchovies or oysters, long in popular use and probably remote descendants of the fishy, fermented Roman sauces
garum
and
liquamen.

But the history of a word is not the history of a dish. Ketchup is not a Chinese sauce of fermented fish brine, a sickly sweet soy from Java, or British oyster juice. Everybody knows what ketchup
is. Ketchup is nothing more or less than a cold, thick, bright crimson, sweet, spicy, acidic, cooked, and strained tomato sauce made with vinegar, sugar, and salt, and flavored with onion or garlic and spices such as cinnamon, cloves, mace, allspice, nutmeg, ginger, and cayenne. The FDA is so sure about this that it requires every one of these elements in anything labeled “Ketchup,” “Catsup,” or “Catchup.” And the tomato seeds and skins must be scrupulously strained out. But more than anything, the FDA’s regulations concentrate on
thickness,
giving it as much space as any other ketchup attribute: “The consistency of the finished food is such that its flow is not more than 14 centimeters in 30 seconds at 20°C when tested in a Bostwick Consistometer in the following manner,” and so forth. The thickness rules go on for another full column in the Code of Federal Regulations.

Henry J. Heinz began making ketchup in the centennial year of 1876 and sold it at the Philadelphia World’s Fair. The Heinz recipe has not changed much since. But H. J. Heinz was neither the inventor of modern-day ketchup nor even the first to bottle it commercially. Its origins are intertwined with the history of tomato cookery in England and America. The tomato is a native of the Andes; but in the early 1500s, while living in Mexico, it discovered an expedition of Spanish conquistadores and followed them back to Europe. There, the tomato found a home in the cookery of Spain, Italy, and Portugal, but northern Europeans dithered for two centuries about whether or not it was poisonous. How the tomato reached North America is a profound mystery. My second-favorite (though nearly unsupported) theory is that the Portuguese brought the plant to Africa and that African slaves later introduced it to the West Indies and Virginia. My most favorite theory is that Sephardic Jews who had fled to Provence from Persia brought the tomato from its new home on the Mediterranean to America, when they immigrated to Charleston, South Carolina. If you are interested in all the details, you’ll enjoy reading a recent article in
Petits Propos Culinaires 39,
by Andrew P. Smith, and various admirable works by Karen Hess, as well as exploring the culinary collection of the New York Public Library.

Tomatoes were considered far less exotic and dangerous in
t
he American colonies than popular history suggests. The widespread story that one Robert Gibbon ate a tomato on the courthouse steps in Salem, New Jersey, in 1820, to demonstrate that tomatoes are not poisonous may be true, but his dramatic demonstration was completely unnecessary. Long before then, in 1756, Hannah Glasse had published the first tomato recipe in English in her immensely popular
Art of Cookery,
which was widely circulated in the colonies. Thomas Jefferson recorded his cultivation of “tomatas” (and that of other farmers) in
Notes on the State of Virginia
in 1785. And we know that some version of tomato ketchup was made in the early kitchens of America: in New Jersey in 1782; on the Mississippi River sometime before the end of the century by Francis Vigo, a Sardinian; and in Mobile, Alabama, by James Mease, who wrote in 1804 that ” ‘Love Apples’ make a fine catsup.”

At least three or four recipes have some claim to being the original tomato ketchup. Having cooked them all, and several others besides, I can say that the model for the kind of tomato sauce that you, the FDA, and Henry J. Heinz would recognize as the modern ketchup was, in fact, the earliest. The first two tomato sauce recipes published in our language appeared in London in 1804 in Alexander Hunter’s
Culina Famulatri
x
Medidnae: or, Receipts in Cookery.
One of them is, in my opinion, the first modern ketchup ever created! It is often attributed to the better-known
A New System of Domestic Cookery,
by Maria Rundell (1813). But it appears that Mrs. Rundell simply lifted her recipe from Alexander Hunter.

Alexander Hunter’s Tomata Sauce (1804)

Take tomat
a
s when ripe, and bake them in an oven, till they become perfectly soft, th
en scoop them out with a tea
poon, and rub the pulp through a sieve. To the
pulp, put as much Chili vinegar as will bring it to proper thickness, with salt to the taste. Add to each quart, half an ounce of garlic and one ounce of shalot, both sliced very thin. Boil during the space of a quarter of an hour, taking care to skim the mixture very well. Then strain, and take out the garlic and shalot… and let it stand for a few days before it is corked up….

This is a charming sauce for all kinds of meat, whether hot or cold.… Being a pleasant acid, [the tomata] is much used by the Spaniards and Portuguese in their soups. In botanical language, it is the Lycopersicon Esculentum. Linn.

Confused on some of the details, I turned for advice to Hunter’s other tomata sauce recipe. There, the tomatoes are roasted in an “earthen pot… after the bread is drawn,” which I figured is the equivalent of about 300 degrees Fahrenheit in a brick oven that you fire once in the early morning and use as it slowly cools throughout the day. Instead of the chili vinegar, “some white wine vinegar, with cayenne pepper” may be substituted. Hunter also adds some powdered ginger, which sounded like a good idea to me.

Roasting five large and very ripe tomatoes for an hour and pushing them through a sieve, I followed the recipe, adding a quarter cup of vinegar, a few pinches of cayenne, and a scant quarter teaspoon of ginger. I boiled down the ketchup for longer than Hunter specifies—to something nearer the properly modern thickness. But thick or thin, and despite the lack of added sugar, the taste and texture come closer to true, modern ketchup than any of the competition from the early nineteenth century. Having invented tomato ketchup, the British then avoided it for more than a hundred years. By then, according to a report in the
New York Tribune
in 1896, tomato ketchup had become our national
condiment, found on every table in the land. Forty-six brands
w
ere sold in Connecticut alone.

Just one thing stood between me and the grand competitive tasting—developing my very own recipe. My objective was to use neither exotic ingredients nor flavorings but to achieve the perfectly smooth, thick texture of Heinz or Hunt’s while preserving more of the fresh tomato taste than they do and drawing as much sweetness and acidity as possible from the tomato itself rather than from added sugar and vinegar. But I certainly did not want the final product to taste too fresh or natural to be real ketchup.

The overall outlines of a modern ketchup are simple: a pound of tomatoes ends up as about a quarter pound of thick ketchup containing about 20 percent sugar and 1.5 percent acid; fresh tomatoes contain 3 or 4 percent sugar to begin with, which becomes 12 to 16 percent as the mixture is boiled down; the tomato’s natural acids concentrate as well. But the more you cook tomatoes to evaporate their water, the more you damage their fresh flavor and color. My solution is a technique sometimes used in making jam—separately reducing the tomato liquid to a thick syrup before adding it back to the pulp for a brief final simmer. This ketchup is easy to make, and delicious.

Olde-Tyme Homemade Ketchup (1993)

Take 10 pounds of very ripe red tomatoes, remove their stems, chop them roughly, and put them in a heavy, wide, nonreactive pan of at least 8-quart capacity. Cover, place the pan over high heat, and cook for 5 to 10 minutes, stirring every minute or so until the tomato chunks give off their juice and everything comes to a boil. In batches, pour into a large, medium-fine strainer set over
a
2-quart saucepan. Gently press and stir the
tomatoes with a wooden spoon so that the thin liquid (about 2 quarts), but none of the tomato pulp, goes into the saucepan. Then put the pulp through a food mill fitted with the finest screen (to eliminate the seeds and skin) and back into the first pan. There will be about a quart of pulp.

To the tomato liquid add 4 garlic cloves and a large onion, both chopped medium-fine;
3
/4 cup of white or cider vinegar; a tablespoon of black peppercorns; a heaping teaspoon of allspice berries; a
cinnamon stick; 8 whole cloves; 1/2
teaspoon each of cayenne and powdered ginger; and
2
1
/2
tablespoons of salt. Cook over moderately high heat for about a half hour, until reduced to 2 thick and syrupy cups. Strain into the pan holding the tomato pulp, pressing to extract all the liquid, stir in 6 tablespoons of sugar, and simmer, stirring often, for 15 minutes, or until the ketchup is reduced by one-third to about a quart. Puree further in a blender or food processor to achieve the authentic texture of commercial ketchup.

At long last, thirty-five ketchups were lined up on our kitchen counter.

“Let the games begin,” my wife said as we walked into our neighborhood McDonald’s. Next to the deep fryers is a bin where cooked potatoes languish under heat lamps until somebody orders them, by which time they may taste like cardboard. So we stood unobtrusively in the condiment and napkin area and waited and watched. When the holding bin was nearly empty and the assistant manager had dropped some fresh potatoes into the deep fryer, we rushed up to the counter and requested ten large orders of fries. A few minutes later we were walking back home with our crispy treasures.

Ten large orders of French fries may be the precise number you need to sample and evaluate thirty-five ketchups. But what we had failed to anticipate is that eating anywhere near this number of French fries slathered with ketchup is nearly impossible. And as the minutes drew on into hours, we became increasingly confused about which ketchups we preferred and why. I remember reading somewhere that a human being is incapable of comparing more than seven things at one time. Two human beings working as a team are no more capable.

Our solution was to assign each ketchup to one of four general categories: Worse Than Heinz, Heinz, Better Than Heinz, and Not Really Ketchup. Both Alexander Hunter’s Tomata Sauce (1804), properly reduced, and our very own Olde-Tyme Homemade Ketchup (1992) usually but not always found themselves in the Better Than Heinz category. If you would like to experience some alternative ketchups yourself, here are our tasting notes (with the New York City sources and prices):