The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [43]
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 F. 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 the 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 Famulatrix Medicinae: 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 tomatas when ripe, and bake them in an oven, till they become perfectly soft, then scoop them out with a tea-spoon, 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