At a time when no one else cared, Heinz was obsessed with making his products as pure as possible. Entire barrels of pulp were stored so badly that, when open, they were found to be filled with mold, yeast, spores, and deadly bacteria.
It wasn’t a bad strategy, except for the fact that they did so with the same carelessness, filthiness, and lack of quality control that was endemic in the food manufacturing industry at the time. A year’s worth of ketchup could not be made in two months, so manufacturers preserved tomato pulp to meet yearly expectations. However, by the late 19th century, Americans were used to expecting ketchup year around. Lasting from mid-August until mid-October, ketchup could only be made fresh for two months out of the year. The reasons ketchup was such vile, potentially deadly slop are varied, but start with the shortness of the tomato season. In fact, when you opened a bottle, the contents could literally kill you. Of course, prior to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 (and as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle famously showed), the food manufacturing business as a whole could largely be described with these same memorable adjectives. “Filthy, decomposed and putrid.” These were the words that cookbook author Pierre Blot used in 1866 to describe the quality of commercial ketchups being sold at the time. Pretty soon, Bennett was publishing recipes for tomato ketchup, which were then concentrated into pill form and sold as a patent medicine across the country. John Cook Bennett declared tomatoes to be a universal panacea that could be used to treat diarrhea, violent bilious attacks, and indigestion. By and large, though, it wasn’t until the 1830s that America got hip to the fact that tomatoes could be delicious. In 1820, Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson of Salem, New Jersey, stood on the steps of the local courthouse and consumed an entire basket of tomatoes to prove they weren’t poisonous. The English enjoyed ketchup for close to 200 years before anyone thought of chucking a tomato in the mix.ĭespite its status as a native fruit, Americans inherited Europe’s aversion to tomatoes. Tomatoes were largely considered an ornamental curiosity for gardens ever since Cortez had brought them back from the Americas in the 1500s, but they weren’t meant to be eaten. The resistance to tomato ketchup can largely be chalked up to the widespread misconception among Europeans that tomatoes, which looked nearly identical to deadly nightshade berries, were poisonous. In fact, even as they experimented with every other variety, the English enjoyed ketchup for close to 200 years before anyone thought of chucking a tomato in the mix. Eventually, anchovies were taken out of the sauce entirely and replaced with walnut ketchup (Jane Austen’s favorite kind) and mushroom ketchup (which tastes similar to Worcestershire sauce). When British traders headed back to England with a taste for the sauce, they attempted to re-create it, Anglicizing it with the addition of (what else?) beer. It was fish sauce, pretty much identical to the fish sauce you can buy by the bottle in any Asian supermarket. In a very real way, the original ketchup wasn’t ketchup at all. It will be ready in twenty days in summer, fifty days in spring or fall and a hundred days in winter.”īy the time the British discovered ke-tchup, the recipe had been simplified into a pungent, amber-colored liquid made out of salted and fermented anchovies. Mix them with a moderate amount of salt and place them in a jar. and instructs any prospective condiment maker to “take the intestine, stomach, and bladder of the yellow fish, shark and mullet, and wash them well. Local recipes for ke-tchup varied, but the first recipe on record dates back to 544 A.D. The long history of ketchup in the Western world extends back to the early 16th century, when British settlers were introduced to a sauce used by Chinese sailors called ke-tchup.
In fact, that most American of condiments isn’t even American.
#Ketchup method map making full#
How deep, then, is a bottle of Heinz Tomato Ketchup, really? What is the meaning behind the “57 Varieties” label wrapped around the bottle’s mouth, and why is it there? Why is a bottle of Heinz Ketchup transparent, instead of opaque? And why does the bottle make such a point of emphasizing that it is specifically full of tomato ketchup, when ketchup is synonymous with tomatoes? Why Tomato Ketchup?Īlthough we most closely associate ketchup with tomatoes these days, ketchup was around for hundreds of years before anyone even dreamed of chucking a tomato in the bottle.
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