The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [44]
This is a charming sauce for all kinds of meat, whether hot or cold.… Being a pleasant acid, [the tomata] is much used by the Spaniards and Portuguese in their soups. In botanical language, it is the Lycopersicon Esculentum. Linn.
Confused on some of the details, I turned for advice to Hunter’s other tomata sauce recipe. There, the tomatoes are roasted in an “earthen pot … after the bread is drawn,” which I figured is the equivalent of about 300 degrees Fahrenheit in a brick oven that you fire once in the early morning and use as it slowly cools throughout the day. Instead of the chili vinegar, “some white wine vinegar, with cayenne pepper” may be substituted. Hunter also adds some powdered ginger, which sounded like a good idea to me.
Roasting five large and very ripe tomatoes for an hour and pushing them through a sieve, I followed the recipe, adding a quarter cup of vinegar, a few pinches of cayenne, and a scant quarter teaspoon of ginger. I boiled down the ketchup for longer than Hunter specifies—to something nearer the properly modern thickness. But thick or thin, and despite the lack of added sugar, the taste and texture come closer to true, modern ketchup than any of the competition from the early nineteenth century. Having invented tomato ketchup, the British then avoided it for more than a hundred years. By then, according to a report in the New York Tribune in 1896, tomato ketchup had become our national condiment, found on every table in the land. Forty-six brands were sold in Connecticut alone.
Just one thing stood between me and the grand competitive tasting—developing my very own recipe. My objective was to use neither exotic ingredients nor flavorings but to achieve the perfectly smooth, thick texture of Heinz or Hunt’s while preserving more of the fresh tomato taste than they do and drawing as much sweetness and acidity as possible from the tomato itself rather than from added sugar and vinegar. But I certainly did not want the final product to taste too fresh or natural to be real ketchup.
The overall outlines of a modern ketchup are simple: a pound of tomatoes ends up as about a quarter pound of thick ketchup containing about 20 percent sugar and 1.5 percent acid; fresh tomatoes contain 3 or 4 percent sugar to begin with, which becomes 12 to 16 percent as the mixture is boiled down; the tomato’s natural acids concentrate as well. But the more you cook tomatoes to evaporate their water, the more you damage their fresh flavor and color. My solution is a technique sometimes used in making jam—separately reducing the tomato liquid to a thick syrup before adding it back to the pulp for a brief final simmer. This ketchup is easy to make, and delicious.
Olde-Tyme Homemade Ketchup (1992)
Take 10 pounds of very ripe red tomatoes, remove their stems, chop them roughly, and put them in a heavy, wide, nonreactive pan of at least 8-quart capacity. Cover, place the pan over high heat, and cook for 5 to 10 minutes, stirring every minute or so until the tomato chunks give off their juice and everything comes to a boil. In batches, pour into a large, medium-fine strainer set over a 2-quart saucepan. Gently press and stir the tomatoes with a wooden spoon so that the thin liquid (about 2 quarts), but none of the tomato pulp, goes into the saucepan. Then put the pulp through a food mill fitted with the finest screen (to eliminate the seeds and skin) and back into the first pan. There will be about a quart of pulp.
To the tomato liquid add 4 garlic cloves and a large onion, both chopped medium-fine; ¾ cup of white or cider vinegar; a tablespoon of black peppercorns; a heaping teaspoon of allspice berries; a cinnamon stick; 8 whole cloves; ¼ teaspoon each of cayenne and powdered ginger; and 2½ tablespoons of salt. Cook over moderately high heat for about a half hour, until reduced to 2 thick and syrupy