The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [41]
I edged warily down the aisle to the shelves of salsa. A glance at the unit-pricing stickers under each brand again proved that ketchup still reigns supreme. The average price for a quart of ketchup in my supermarket came to $1.16; the salsas averaged $5.50. Divide the first price into the second, and you’ll see that on whatever day in 1992 dollar sales of all the salsas put together exceed those of ketchup, ketchup will still be 4.74 times more popular than salsa because salsa is 4.74 times more expensive. I left the supermarket in a gay and celebratory mood and in possession of every type of ketchup they had on offer, nine in all. Within a few days I had ransacked the other markets in my neighborhood, all the fancy-food stores, and every mail-order company I could think of.
Buying a bottle of ketchup is not a mindless matter of pulling it off the shelf and paying some money. As with wines, there are good years and bad, depending on how sweet and flavorful the tomatoes were. Most brands are made from tomato paste or tomato concentrate, boiled down in late summer when the tomatoes are harvested, and used throughout the year to cook the final product. But ketchup bottled in the summer is often made directly from ripe tomatoes. The ketchup connoisseur will want to know the year and day the sauce was bottled. If Heinz is your favorite, look at the four-digit number on the bottle cap, ignoring the initial two letters. The last digit indicates the year and the first three digits tell you the day when the ketchup was bottled. For example, 0752 means the seventy-fifth day of 1992; 2530, a vintage still on the shelves, means the two-hundred-fifty-third day of 1990. If you prefer another brand, telephone the manufacturer for details.
At last, when thirty-three ketchups stood on my kitchen table, I was ready to begin planning a Festival of Ketchups, a grand competitive tasting. Does Heinz truly deserve 55 percent of the U.S. ketchup market with Hunt’s a laggard at 19 percent and Del Monte a wimpy 9 percent, while all generic and private brands add up to 17 percent, and the sum total of gourmet and regional ketchups reaches only 2 percent? I began with the assumption that the answer is yes, because Heinz is the only brand of ketchup I ever buy. Or should I say it was the only brand of ketchup I ever bought? But that would give away the results of the competition.
The scientific ketchup contests I’ve read about used either plastic spoons or little dry crackers as a tasting medium, with water or club soda between bites. This seems logical, but so does a hamburger and French fries, with a bubbly gulp of diet Coke in between, which is certainly how ketchup is deployed in the real world. In a preparatory experiment with several of the ketchups in my collection, I discovered that their flavor is transformed by the way you taste them: once the mouth becomes acclimated to the sweetness of Coke, for example, the cloying sugariness of some ketchups disappears, but the decorous sweet-sour balance of others tips toward the acidic. The spicier varieties, usually designer ketchups, are zesty on a plastic spoon but obscure the loveliness of a crisp French fry, which the blander, mainstream brands perfectly complement. The choice of a tasting medium would be absolutely critical.
I worried that eating thirty-three hamburgers in a row would be impractical, as was, I would soon discover, cutting a single hamburger into thirty-three equal wedges. I set out to design a miniature hamburger the diameter of a quarter (four millimeters thick), with a tiny little hamburger bun on top and bottom. Getting the outside of the meat nice and crusty while keeping the inside red and juicy proved impossible on so small a scale, and I forsook this plan even before I had got down