The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [46]
• Hunt’s Tomato Ketchup, 32 ounces for $1.69 at Sloan’s. Occasionally seemed Better Than Heinz. Thick and spicy, but excessive flavor of onion powder or garlic powder. Too salty.
• Jardine’s Jalapeño Texas Ketchup, from Mo Hotta Mo Betta, 11 ounces for $5.25. Not much tomato taste. The powerful flavor of cumin belongs in chili powder or Tex-Mex cuisine but never ever in ketchup.
• Krasdale Fancy Tomato Catsup, from Sloan’s, 14 ounces for $.89. Seems identical to A&P’s house brand; see above.
• McIlhenny Farms Spicy Ketchup, 14 ounces for $3.95 at Dean & DeLuca. Good, deep taste of the Tabasco sauce for which McIlhenny is famous, but does nothing for French fries and tends to pall in ketchup-sized servings. Slightly runny.
• Napa Valley Mustard Co. Country Catsup, 14 ounces for $4.25 at Dean & DeLuca. Very good, balanced taste, but a little too much like barbecue sauce: more texture than classic, modern ketchup should have.
• Nervous Nellie’s Jams & Jellies Hot Tomato Sweet Sauce, 6 ounces for $3.50. Delicious but more like a tomato jam than a ketchup. The only specimen with more sugar than tomatoes on the list of ingredients.
• Tassa Scotch Bonnet Catsup, from Mo Hotta Mo Betta, 5 ounces for $3.75. More a hot sauce than a ketchup. In fact, one of the hottest things I’ve tasted in months. Slightly musty flavor. My mouth won’t stop burning.
• Tree of Life Ketchup, 13.5 ounces for $2.40 at Infiniti Health Food. Brownish color, slightly chunky, too much taste of tomato skins and maybe seeds, doesn’t last in the mouth, unaccountably sweetened with brown-rice syrup. Inaccurate drivel on the label regarding the history of ketchup.
• Uncle Dave’s Ketchup, 14 ounces for $4.50 at Infiniti Health Food. Tiny chunks with good tomato taste. But why sweeten ketchup with maple syrup and leave out most of the salt?
• Uncle Dave’s Kickin’ Ketchup, from Mo Hotta Mo Betta, 16 ounces for $6.50. Too much like barbecue or chili sauce, with strong taste of cumin and, I’ll bet, celery seed.
• Weight Watchers Tomato Ketchup, from Gristede’s, 13.25 ounces for $1.69. Another unnecessary product from an organization that victimizes chubby people like me by charging 33 percent more than the identical Heinz Lite.
• Westbrae Natural Catsup, Fruit-Sweetened, 11.5 ounces for $2.60 from Infiniti Health Food. “Fruit” means grape juice, which does not belong in the same bottle with catsup.
• Westbrae Natural Un-Ketchup, Unsweetened, 11.5 ounces for $2.45. The only brand whose label lists water before tomatoes among the ingredients. Caramelized taste indicates overcooking. And don’t they know that “catsup” is synonymous with “ketchup”?
• Westbrae Natural Catsup, Fruit-Sweetened, No Salt Added, 11.5 ounces for $2.60. The most distasteful of the three Westbrae offerings.
• White Rose Tomato Ketchup, 28 ounces for $1.49 at Gristede’s. Medium thick, smooth, properly sweet and salty, but not enough piquancy or astringency. Could this be identical to A&P’s?
• Wine Country Zinfandel Catsup, from Cuisine Perel, 12 ounces for $6.72. Overwhelming taste of ginger, no apparent taste of Zinfandel. A wine-country rip-off.
August 1992
*For a more comprehensive discussion of fries, please refer to the chapter of that name in Part Five.
PART TWO
Help Yourself
Le Régime Montignac
Day One. Thoroughly disrobed, bone-dry, and advantageously evacuated, I step onto my rusty old Detecto Doctor’s Scale, the kind with the balance beam and the little weights that you nudge back and forth. The numbers are chest high and easily legible, meaning that you can leave your eyeglasses on the sink and save two ounces. No need to peer five feet down to the floor over a pile of sullied flesh.
Let us say that I weigh 160 pounds. No, let us say I weigh 170; 160 would create a credibility gap. Neither is accurate, of course, but I want to tell you all about my new diet without revealing my precise weight, which is an embarrassment—170 is embarrassing enough.
Let us say that I weigh 170 pounds and need to lose 35 of them. This means that I weigh 25.93