Rural Intelligence bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Mark writes: Peter’s reminiscences of tomatoes last week seems to have flowed right into my stream of consciousness. Like other Americans, when I think of tomatoes, it is natural for me to think next of ketchup. If you had asked me twenty years ago what ketchup was, I could have described it confidently as a very sweet and somewhat sour dressing made of tomatoes and spices. Heinz was the real original ketchup in my book, and every other brand was an imitator. I suspected that others were not even entitled to use the name, and I assumed that some bottles said “catsup,” as a legal manoeuver to avoid being accused of infringing on the trademark of the real Heinz “ketchup,”. I had definite opinions about ketchup's use. I have never understood how people could put ketchup on everything, including hamburgers, when in my view it should be reserved for that triumph of American cuisine, French fries. Naturally, I was among the outraged when in 1981, Ronald Reagan’s agriculture department proposed counting ketchup as a vegetable, allowing school cafeterias to eliminate an expensive fresh vegetable from their menus, yet still comply with the daily dietary requirements that came with federal school lunch funding.
Times have changed. I still feel that French fries are incomplete without ketchup, but I sense that America’s love affair with the condiment has faded somewhat. Marketing firms focused on the increased influence of Hispanics in America have proclaimed that ketchup is no longer king of American condiments, having been supplanted by salsa. (It turns out that salsa's triumph is only in the dollar value of its sales. The absolute volume of ketchup sold still exceeds that of salsa, and three times as many families use ketchup in a week as use salsa.) In New Orleans, I've seen t-shirts that slyly poke fun at ketchup enthusiasts, proclaiming: “I put ketchup on my ketchup.” But for me, the most significant change has been recognizing, rather late in life, that the universe of ketchup is larger than just the sweet red stuff. In our shorthand vernacular, ketchup has come to stand for tomato ketchup. But there's more.
Etymologists and cooking historians tell us that the term ketchup derives from east Asia, but the details of that origin are a bit obscure. Calvin and Audrey Evans Lee's "The Gourmet Chinese Regional Cookbook" says that the term derives from the Chinese words for "brine of pickled fish." Eileen Yin-Fei Lo's "Chinese Kitchen" reports that it may come from a very specific concoction on the island of Amoy, a combination of fish essence and soy sauce called "keh chap". Some on-line dictionaries report that ketchup derives from a Malay word. Various sources seem to agree that English sailors brought the Asian ketchup back from their travels in the 17th century, that by the 18th century, the recipe had been altered to include such ingredients as anchovies, lemon, shallots and mushrooms, and that eventually, in that same century, perhaps in Nova Scotia, tomatoes entered the picture. Early versions of western ketchup were thin, much like a sort of soy or Worcestershire sauce. A New England farmer, Jonas Yerkes, started bottling tomato ketchup in 1837, the H.J. Heinz company started its version—supposedly the current recipe in 1872, and the rest is history. In the circular pattern that seems to often characterize the evolution of food tastes, some Chinese recipes today use tomato ketchup, and the version they use is adopted from the standard American product. One thing the histories of ketchup don't seem to note is that at some point ketchup apparently came to refer, in American culinary usage, to other produce preserved in vinegar. In this frantic season of harvesting and preserving, I’ve been confirming my appreciation for one of those other types of ketchup and getting to know yet another.
In the past few years I've particularly come to value cucumber ketchup. I came across the recipe for it in The White House Cookbook, by Mrs. F.L. Gillette, an invaluable reference library components for anyone striving for a high-quality, 19th-century lifestyle. Originally published in 1887, we have the 1889 version published by L.P. Miller & Co (Chicago, Philadelphia and Stockton, CA), and the early pages are so dog eared and disconnected (we keep that part of the book in a plastic sleeve) that I can't really tell if the recipes purport to come from the White House. I think not. From the portion of the preface I can read, it seems these are just recipes tested by Mrs. Gillette over a 40 year period until she established to her satisfaction that they invariably succeeded and were the best of their kind. She did, however, dedicate her book to "the Wives of Our Presidents, Those Noble Women who have Graced the White House, and whose Names and Memories are dear to all Americans." The updated versions of this cookbook, from what I can see on Amazon.com, do have actual White House recipes, but I think mostly what the original version had was pictures of the various first ladies and a misleading title. Misleading or not, the contents are superb. Her three pages of catsups include not only tomato but also walnut, apple, oyster, gooseberry and mushroom catsups, and this remarkably simple recipe for cucumber catsup:
"Take cucumbers suitable for the table; peel and grate them, salt a little, and put in a bag to drain overnight; in the morning season to taste with salt, pepper and vinegar, put in small jars and seal tight for fall or winter use." This has been a perfect year for cucumber ketchup, because, from the middle of July on, our cucumber vines have produced consistently large quantities of both slicing cucumbers and the Armenian long cukes. We are swimming in the things. With this recipe you can reduce a huge volume of cucumber to a small concentrated quantity of ketchup, and it keeps wonderfully in the fridge (I haven’t tried to keep it at room temperature, but it may well work there too). I seed the cucumber, as well as peel it. With the modern wonder of the Cuisinart, the grating is reduced to a few moments of preparation. I have jelly bags to use here at the farm, but when I'm making it in the City I simply hang the grated cucumber in a cheesecloth tied onto the kitchen faucet. What I like about this recipe is the purity of the cucumber flavor that’s preserved. This is unlike pickling, which infuses whole cucumbers or slices with flavors of garlic, dill, and/or pickling spices. Also, unlike pickles, you don't add alum, so there's no pucker when you eat it. Rather, it tastes simply like salted cucumber, transporting you back to the taste of the cool summer cuke, far richer and sweeter than the huge waxed imported supermarket cucumbers you can buy in winter. You can add the grated cucumber ketchup to winter salad or, if you're as much a fan of Indian food as I am, it is the perfect base for cucumber raita -- mixed with yoghurt, garlic and whatever else your raita recipe calls for. Should you have the urge, winter white gazpacho becomes a possibility too.
My new ketchup for this summer is plum ketchup, which the 1960s' American Regional Cookbook I inherited from my mother says is a traditional condiment with meat and poultry in the Pacific Northwest. I made my first batch with our Shiro plums. I left it boiling a little too long, turning it into a paste rather than the flowing consistency you'd associate with a ketchup, but I am very pleased with the taste. I think I can save it by mixing the paste with a little vinegar and water to achieve the desired consistency when I’m ready to use it. This week I’m trying our tiny little wild American plums, which are not very good eating (they go from bitter to bloopy very quickly, and to my mind resemble in flavor and texture very large Delaware or Catawba grapes). But I have the sense that they will make an interesting ketchup—that is, if I keep my eye on the boiling pot. These ketchups don't resemble each other very much, but they are each appealing in the way they concentrate the flavor of the fruit or vegetable you are preserving. That's why I've become a fan of preserving the harvest in ketchup. —Mark ScherzerFor the complete archive of past AgriCulture blogs, click here.
