The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [42]
A decision was taken: my wife and I would rate our ketchups both on and off French fries from the McDonald’s three blocks away, ironically à côté de my local farmers’ market. McDonald’s once fried the most perfect, and certainly the most reliable, potatoes in the nation: then some genius got the idea that deep-frying in pure, golden beef fat is not politically correct. He or she was undoubtedly correct, but now its fries merit a rating no higher than Acceptable Plus.*
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 kôe-chiap or ké-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