The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [40]
October 1992
Playing Ketchup
In England there are sixty different religions, and only one sauce.
—MARQUIS DOMENICO CARACCIOLO (1715–1789)
When rumor recently reached my ears that U.S. sales of salsa would soon eclipse those of ketchup, catsup, and catchup (these words all mean the same thing), I rushed down to my local supermarket, planted myself in the ketchup department, and stood a lonely, anxious vigil, as though my presence alone could stanch the tide of chunky, piquant salsa that menaced from the opposite end of aisle 5.
I yield to no one in my toleration of multiculturalism in America. I eagerly celebrate Cinco de Mayo, Chinese New Year, the Festa of San Gennaro, and the Decay of the Ottoman Empire with whatever banquet is most fitting. But ketchup’s fall to second-class status is another thing entirely, which is what the packaged-food experts predict. According to Fortune, sales of “Mexican sauces” will reach $802 million in 1992, leaving ketchup in the dust at $723 million. Even worse, the gap will widen for three more years.
To my mind, ketchup stands in the top tier of the world’s cold or tepid nondessert sauces. It is surely our proudest, perhaps our only, homegrown sauce achievement. Marquis Domenico Caracciolo, ambassador from Naples to England, was probably referring to crème anglaise, the greatest dessert sauce ever created, but he might as well have been talking ketchup. Ninety-seven percent of American homes keep ketchup in the kitchen. Each of us blissfully eats three bottles of it a year. A tablespoon of ketchup is packed with flavor but carries only sixteen calories and no fat; it is recommended for dieters and skinny people alike. Four tablespoons of ketchup, the amount you might consume on a hamburger and a large order of fries, is the nutritional equivalent of an entire ripe medium tomato, with none of the fuss and bother.
Ketchup is “one of the great successes the sauce world has ever known,” wrote Elisabeth Rozin in the Journal of Gastronomy (Summer 1988). In its brilliant red color, its rich flavor, and its marked salinity, Rozin theorizes, ketchup represents the “fulfillment, both real and symbolic, of the ancient and atavistic lust for blood,” magically achieved with the use of plant products alone. Rozin also draws an analogy to the Christian Mass and its fruity surrogate for the blood of Christ, but I forget how it goes. All I know is that I discovered a case of Del Monte in one of the celebrated kitchens of Piemonte, in northern Italy, vying with tartufi and porcini for the chef’s affections. And last year in Paris, in a kitchen soon to receive its second Michelin star, I watched the chef add a dollop of Heinz to his sauce of salmon’s blood, red wine, and verjus, a postmodernization of Escoffier’s sauce genevoise. Miguel de Cervantes once wrote, “La mejor salsa del mundo es la hambre,” the best sauce in the world is the hunger. Cervantes had obviously never tasted ketchup.
Will 1992 be the year we abandon our own great sauce, our most excellent ketchup?
Not exactly. Briefly leaving my shopping cart on guard, I bought a bag of potato chips (natural flavor, not rancho or nacho) and a plastic squeeze bottle of Heinz ketchup, the standard by which all other ketchups, for better or worse, must be measured. I swirled some Heinz on a potato chip and munched thoughtfully. Before long, my mood had brightened. The article in Fortune was surely a false alarm; either the magazine does not know its sauces, or else it has deliberately set out to undermine America’s confidence in its own condiments. Comparing the sales of all Mexican sauces to the sales of ketchup, just one sauce, is unjust and misleading. Just think of the multitude of sauces in Mexican cuisine, their mole de olla and mole verde de pepita, red sesame seed sauce and green