February 14, 2018 • 43 mins
That stuff you probably dip your fries in descended from Chinese fermented fish sauce, and it had a hand in creating the FDA. We explore the non-Newtonian science and surprisingly fascinating history of ketchup.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hello, and welcome to food Stuff. I'm Anyrees and I'm
Lauren bogel Bum and today we're talking about Ketchup. Oh yes,
way more about Ketchup than I thought was there. It's
really fascinating, it really is. It touched on so many
things I never would have guessed. It's part of the
reason why we have the f d A. Yeah, it
(00:30):
really is. It's such a fascinating story. And it's also
one of my weirdest favorite foods that I have one
of your favorite foods in general, or I've I've kind
of grown out of it. But when I was a kid,
I would eat ketchup sandwiches, and I think that's a
common kid thing to do. I've never heard of it,
(00:53):
but I'm I wouldn't be surprised because kids do like
those weird things like pickled juice. I feel like kids
really like pickle juice anyway. I would also I preferred
ketchup to French fries that I knew it wasn't socially
acceptable to just get catch up ketchup, so I would
order fries and then not really eat them and just
kind of like try to be subtle about the fact
(01:14):
that I was mostly eating, just catch up up until
what age? Because you say that you ordered the fries,
so you were old enough to be like verbal and
perhaps like have your own money. Yeah, I was definitely.
I remember very vividly being called out on this in college.
(01:34):
That's amazing. Yeah, I also like ketchup. I can't profess
to have that level. Well, it's weird and it's It
brings me to a topic I really want to talk
about one day, is why do we like the foods
we like? Because that's strange. I know that's strange. Why
is my body like? Yeah, ketchup, get me more of this.
(01:57):
It's very bizarre. But anyway, we should are talking about
what it is. It's right, ketch up. What is it?
It's a condiment that uses tomatoes as a base, usually
with vinegar, sweetener, and spices like onions, are garlic. Other
common spices include pepper, cayenne, pepper, paprika, also a pepper, mustard, cloves, allspice,
and cinnamon. And you can find it pretty much on
(02:21):
every hamburger, every hot dog or not. I've I've found
some very heated opinions about that one. I have a
very heated opinion about that one. Do you remind me
to ask you about it later? Um, every diner table
in the US at least, um, or is it dipping
sauce for front fries or pretty much any kind of
potatoes and potato product, right, Yeah, And as far as
(02:42):
taste goes, I'm going to imagine you've had it, but
if you haven't, it's kind of a sweet, savory, sort
of twangy barbecue sauce esque taste. Sure. Yeah. Oh, and
we like to talk about spelling on this podcast. It's
a great audio of things I know, isn't it. It's
so fun to explain. But so you've probably seen catchup
(03:07):
k E T c h up. That's the more common spelling,
but also cats up like c A T s e
P still pronounced catchup. Yeah, but I say in my
head though, it's cats up too, And basically the reason
this whole thing exists, Um, it was mostly cats up
until Hynes of Catchup fame came along and wanted to
(03:29):
stand out from the crowd, and they marketed their product
as ketchup. Yeah. More on that a little bit later. Oh, yes,
but first, how do we get catch up? Does it
spring fourth whole from I'm not sure what it would
spring forth from. I don't like what's what's what's the
zeus of of of catchup of condiments? Oh, the first condiment.
(03:51):
I don't know if a condment family tree would be
very interesting. Actually, okay regardless. Um, first you've got to
grow some tomatoes. Those tomatoes are then graded and the
ones that pass ketchup mustard are washed, chopped, and scaled.
That is pre cooked for preservation and sterilization purposes. Then
you pump them into a cyclone. It's a it's an
(04:13):
industry term for a machine that separates and filters the
pulp and the juice out from all the stems and
skins and seeds. Still cool, Still pretty cool. Yeah. You
then cook the pulp for about thirty minutes, adding in
various flavorings as you go. The whole thing is then
filtered through a finishing machine to get rid of any
chunks um and or maybe milled for texture consistency. Excess
(04:38):
air is removed and it's packaged hot to prevent bacteria growth,
then cooled to prevent flavor loss from from overcooking. M hmm.
And there is a crazy amount of science that goes
into when you add different flavorings and in what formats.
Uh Onions and garlic can be steeped in in bags
like like tea. Spices can be added ground or as
(05:00):
essential oils. Adding your sugar too soon can create a
burnt taste, and vinegar and any oils will evaporate if
you let them cook too long. There's a lot going
on there. There's a lot going on there, more more
than I had personally thought about previous to reading long
industry papers. I really thought it was just like blended
tomatoes with sugar in there. Right, no, very complicated. Kind
(05:22):
of makes me appreciate it more. Speaking of sugars, there
has been something of an industry kerfuffle over the type
of sweeteners used in Ketchup, partially because your typical tomato
Ketchup is almost a quarter sugar by weight. As health
professionals and the public at large have become more concerned
about added sugars, sneaky sugar foods like Ketchup have become
a target, and so different brands use different types, from
(05:45):
beat sugar to high fructose corn syrup. Oh man, we
need to do an episode about high fructose corn syrup sometime.
We do. I feel like We've tackled a lot of
sweetening things because we're just so into it, so into
things tasting sweet. But yes, I freaked toast corn syrup. Yeah.
And speaking of health, um, it's complicated. Ketchup is about
(06:10):
fifteen calories per tablespoon, and each tablespoon has about four
grams of sugar, mostly from added sugars, although the label
doesn't differentiate between added and natural sugars because tomatoes do
have but we I think we can we can guess
it's mostly added. Yeah. Um, and eight tablespoons of ketchup
will put you at the recommended daily sodium limit. I
(06:32):
feel like you could get to eight pretty quickly. You
could certainly get um. It does have some vitamin A,
vitamin C, and lycopene. A two thousand four study from
the Harvard School of Public Health suggested that women who
had elevated blood levels of lycopene lower their risk Aparte
disease by fi UM. I think it's also been there's
(06:54):
studies about it being good for preventing cancer. Mmm. So
people use at as an excuse to eat more Ketchup
and catch up companies capitalized on it as well. But
as we often say on this show bodies are complicated,
more research is needed, and there are better ways to
get your lecopine than catch up, probably like tomatoes. Um. Okay,
we don't say that last bit too often, but it's
(07:16):
still true. It's still true. Yes, if we look at
catchup by the numbers of US households reported having a
bottle of Ketchup in the refrigerator in Yeah, Americans buy
about ten billion ounces a year, which comes out to
around three bottles per person, which is a lot of ketchup. Yeah.
(07:41):
I kind of wonder, like, I don't know why, but
meat loaf or or things recipes that have catch up
Because for me it's a condiment. I'm not using it
in recipes, but I bet if you used it for
something like that, I don't know. Thoughts for another podcast.
We do make most of our catch up here, but
also import a lot from Cada. This is way more
(08:02):
Ketchup than the rest of the world consumes, by the way,
as we were responsible for about thirty seven of the
global ketchup market. Wow. Of course, there there are other
tomato based condiments in other countries, but ketchup is very local.
According to the U s d A and unopened bottle
of Ketchup will last a year in your pantry, and
(08:23):
an opened one a month, and if you refrigerate them,
an opened bottle is good for six months. I feel
like I've had the bottle of Ketchup in my refrigerator
for far longer than that. Oh yeah, I can't, I
shuddered to think. Moving on, if we just look at
Hines branded Ketchup per year, they sell six hundred fifty
(08:45):
million bottles. They are I believe the leader of the industry. Well,
I mean, there's certainly the leader in the industry is
a single brand, but I think about like fifty of
the Ketchup that we buy as Hines. Yeah, I would
believe it. Salt Out sold Ketchup for the first time
a couple of years ago. I know. Ketchup is currently
(09:06):
the third best selling condiment in the US, behind salsa
and the number one mayonnaise, which is one of my
four foods that I don't like. Really, yeah, I totally
forgot about it because I just never have mayonnaise. Until
I was reading this, I was like, oh, oh, yeah,
I'll see. I like dipping my fries and mayonnaise. I
(09:28):
can understand it. And I watch people in the joy
in their eyes, and I wish I could. I wish
I could enjoy it, but sometimes I like it mixed
in other things, you know. Okay, alright, it's not a
total alright, yeah, we'll have to okay, whole other again,
whole other episodes. Okay, um uh yeah. The greatest share
of the ketchup market is not the home market, which
we have just been talking about, but the fast food industry.
(09:51):
Different analysts are reporting different futures for the market, with
maybe decreases in the United States as young consumers are
shying away from sational fast food, but increases globally as
the global middle class kind of expands and French fries
are eaten by more other people. This is true. You're
welcome world, Yeah, question mark. In the United States, ketchup,
(10:19):
no matter how you spell it, has been defined specifically
as tomato ketchup since at least the nineties, like legally,
but there's been all kinds of flavors of ketchup. Banana
ketchup using bananas in the place of tomatoes is popular
in the Philippines. In our fridge at work, there is
saracha ketchup. I find that interesting. Uh, there's pear, sweet mustard,
(10:41):
also funny mango, cranberry, carrot, apple, plum, goes on and on,
cucumber and grape. Where the two great that I ran across.
I'm not sure what that looks like. But yeah. Oh,
by the way, what makes some ketchup fancy? If it's
homemade and you're at a hipster rip stock? No, well,
(11:01):
I mean that too, but no, it's a grading term.
The U s d A defines three grades of ketchup
see through A or standard, extra standard, which is a
great phrase, and fancy um Better color, consistency and uniformity
make better grades of ketchup. So fancy catchup is the
best noted. The world's largest Ketchup bottle, because you know
(11:25):
there is one is located in Collinsville, Illinois, which at
one time was home of the largest Ketchup bottling plant.
It's a combination water tower ketchup bottle that measures in
total one and seventy feet or fifty two meters, and
it has quite the fan club. There's literally a fan club. Um,
(11:47):
it's got a website and an annual festival. It looks
really cool and I love ketchup. So who field chip
always every episode, how We're going to fit in all
these field chips. It was built way back in nine
forty nine. It was almost torn down in the nineteen
nineties after the town's ketchup operations were moved elsewhere and
the property that it sits on was sold, but a
(12:09):
restoration and preservation effort saved it still there. The same
town also built the world's the world's largest ketchup packet,
and this one actually held ketchup onlike this water tower,
which never was never filled with ketchup. To my personal knowledge,
um about a hundred and twenty seven gallons went into
the world's largest ketchup packet. That's about four and eighty
(12:31):
one leaders. It measured four by eight feet or one
point two by two point four meters, and to fill it,
Hines donated four thousand normal ketchup bottles to the town.
The town sold the chance to to pour those bottles
in for a buck apiece to raise money for a
local school. Okay, and the packet, hypothetically and unless someone
(12:55):
something has changed, lives at the Hines corporate headquarters in
Pittsburgh and listed in the Guinness Book of Records as
the world's largest condiment satchet satchet sachet that it's not
a term I would have used, but I do enjoy it.
And one more record for you. The fastest anyone has
drank a bottle of ketchup on record, anyway, is in
(13:19):
twenty five point three seven seconds. The record holder used
a straw. Oh man, see, I like ketchup and my
stomach is not on board with that. Yeah. I made
the same face that Annie is making right now when
I read about that one. There's a photograph attached. It's great,
as all of this might indicate, ketchup today is seen rightfully,
(13:42):
so I would say has very much an American condiment.
But that was not always the case, and the first
catchups were not invented in the US. Nope. The story
of ketchup is frequently described as a prime example of
globalization and shifting global political power. Catch Up, catch up? Yep.
(14:03):
More on that after a quick break for a word
from our sponsor, and we're back. Thank you, sponsor, Yes,
thank you. Let's start our history segment with one of
our favorite things, etymology. Yes, catch up. We're so excited
(14:28):
about it. I hope that you were just as pumped
as we are. Catch Up probably comes from the Chinese
word which, um, what did kits yap mean? You ask?
It was the name for a fermented fish sauce. That's
the car going off the road. By the way, I'm
(14:50):
really good at sound offense. Yeah. Wait wait so fish
fish sauce. Yeah, fermented fish, fermented fish back Darya poo.
I know another thing we love. Yes, Ketchup in its
original form did not have tomatoes. If you've ever looked
at a catchup bottle, and I'm guessing you have, maybe
you recall it. The label reads tomato ketchup, which, until
(15:13):
someone pointed this out when I was researching it, I
had never never like clicked yeah that it does in
fact say tomato ketchup, as in ketchup isn't or it
wasn't always tomato based. The first written mention of a
fermented fish paste our sauce in China dates back to
three BC. It might be made with fish and trails,
(15:34):
meat by products, or soy beans, and the things I
read said it was good at complimenting savory flavors. I
feel like fish sauce. There's there's a whole garum thing
in Roman times. Need to anyway, Yeah, please continue, here's
one of the first recipes from five four BC. Take
the intestine, stomach and bladder of the yellow fish, shark
(15:57):
and mullet and wash them well, mix them with a
moderate amount of salt, and place them in a jar
sealed tightly, and incubate in the sun. It will be
ready in twenty days in summer, fifty days in spring
our fall, and in one hundred days in winter. Who
incubate in the sun? I do. I've never had a
(16:18):
recipe that said incubate and the sun preferably far away
from anywhere where you hang out, I would imagine, But
then someone might steal here. You can't. So this sauce
stored and kept easily, meaning it was popular on long
journeys and trade routes. From China. It traveled to Malaysia
(16:40):
and Indonesia via traders picking up the names could chop
and catch chop, respectively. After sailors from England encountered it
in the seventeenth century, they tried to recreate the condiment
in their own country. The word catch up like catch
c A T C H plus up you pee was
first record did in the New Dictionary of the terms
(17:02):
Ancient and modern of the canting crew the title with
the description High East India Sauce. In sixt a British
merchant gave this advice on buying ketchup. Soy comes in
tubs from Japan and the best ketchup from northern Vietnam.
Yet good of both sorts are made and sold very
(17:24):
cheap in China. I know not a more profitable commodity.
Wow in seventy seven are in some places I read?
It appeared in the seventeen fifty reprint The Complete Housewife
included a recipe for a sauce called English ketchup, made
out of twelve to fourteen anchovi's, ten to twelve shallots,
(17:45):
white wine, vineager, white wine, mace, ginger clothes, whole peppers,
a whole nutmeg, lemon peel, and horse radis mixed together
and then shaking a bottle once or twice a day
for a week and toda. This recipe was frequently reprinted
up until the nineteenth century, so people must have liked it.
And key here too. Something I I forget a lot um.
(18:07):
People didn't have refrigeration at this time, right, so you
either had like cold ish sellar. Right are we're making
this like shrug, yeah, you fresh food exactly. So, just
like the sailors, they appreciated the long shelf life of ketchup,
and early attempts to recreate ketchup in England included beer, because,
(18:29):
of course they did, of course they did a little
over a decade later in the seventeen forties, spiced sauce,
as ketchup was known in England was a regular condiment
at the dinner table. Still not how we'd think of it,
though the consistency was thinner, the color was a lot darker,
and on top of the stuff we just mentioned in
that recipe, the English might add cinnamon, mustard, seeds are chien,
(18:52):
pepper or walnuts, oysters, muscles, celery, plums, peaches, or mushrooms.
Jane Austen was a fan of mushroom ketchup. Another sip
I found called for not one, not to but one
hundred oysters, three points of white wine, lemon peels and
mace and clothes. That's a lot of oysters. That is many,
(19:17):
okay h. It wasn't until eighteen twelve that the first
recipe for ketchup using tomatoes was published, courtesy of James
mice Nice was a horticulturist and a scientist, and the
recipe referred to tomatoes as love apples. That's one of
my favorite episodes. That was such a good one. Uh. Anyway,
(19:38):
who knows how long Mes worked on perfecting his tomato ketchup,
because he mentioned it in eighteen o four, eight years earlier,
and he mentioned it that he believed love apples would
make a fine catsup. I'm just gonna use cats up
to differentiate so I don't have to spell it every time.
(19:58):
One thing I read positive that all of the things
added and ketchup at this time, and currently tomatoes, mushrooms,
oysters are big on that fifth taste or savory yeah,
which I thought was interesting. Meanwhile, speaking of our tomato episode,
tomatoes were growing in popularity around this time. There was
this kind of stunt that happened in eighteen twenty in
(20:20):
which one Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson stood on the steps
of a local New Jersey courthouse and eight tomatoes. He
just went through tomatoes until the crowd, which had gathered,
which was convinced that they were poisonous, was like, Oh,
I guess, I guess he's fine. I guess they're not poisons.
I guess they're not poisonous this whole time. Yeah, yeah,
(20:42):
it's a great it's a great story and uh you
can check out our tomato episode to learn more. And
if you haven't heard it, I highly recommend it. Recipes
for ketchup or tomato soy as it was now called,
were present in many of the first American cookbooks, including
The Virginia Housewife by Mary Randolph around eighteen thirty four,
(21:02):
and Ohio and doctor John Cook. Bennett got the idea
that tomatoes were this universal gut pansia that they could
like treat all sorts of digestion problems, and he started
publishing recipes for tomato ketchup, which was then concentrated into
pillform and sold as patent medicine. It's kind of fascinating
(21:25):
how it went from don't eat these SNAs pores and
it will kill you too. Here their medicinal take a
film very quickly, humans are we can just pop around
in that mind um. Miss Beaton's book of household Management
and eighteen sixty one bestseller King with several ketchup recipes,
mostly of the mushroom and oyster variety, and over the
(21:48):
next few decades, tomato ketchups medicinal popularity would grow to
the point that people apparently thought of tomato ketchup as
being like a health tonic. Wow. There was a problem
odd on by addition of tomatoes, though, it didn't preserve
as well, and that whole long lasting thing was an
enormous part of ketchups appeal. The tomato growing season was
(22:10):
short too, so growers needed a way to keep tomato
preserves all year long. A lot of companies attempted to
commercialize tomato ketchup, but they ran into a a lot
of problems, sometimes deadly ones with yeast, mold, and bacteria.
Oh and they also contained cold tar to get that
(22:30):
red color, and boric acid that were not good for
you know, um, Okay. The thing here is that you
had like two months out of the year to produce
fresh tomato pulp for catchup, and you couldn't make a
year supply of catchup very quickly, and you didn't have
good refrigeration or even reliable canning technology yet, so you
(22:53):
wound up with people adding various chemicals to preserve the pulp.
Stuff that is not super good for you. Boric acid formula,
which is a solution of formaldehyde and water um benzoic acid. Also,
the acids in ketchups would interact with the copper tubs
that they were often cooked in. Uh huh. In eighteen
sixty six, Pierre Blott, a French cookbook author, called commercially
(23:16):
available ketchup filthy, decomposed, and putrid. A study out of
California conducted in eight six found that ketchup brands contained
injurious ingredients like salasilic acid, you know, like known carcinogens,
known carcinogens in the eighteen hundreds. Something had to be
pretty bad at that anyway. Yeah. One of the guys
(23:40):
leading the effort to rid ketchup of benzoates was Dr
Harvey Washington Wiley. Oh man, this guy, Yeah, more on
him in a minute. But he was so passionate about
this that in eighteen seventy six he joined forces with
a fella in Pittsburgh named Henry J. Hydes, Yes that Hides,
(24:01):
who by that time was already making ketchup. He started
selling the stuff in eighteen seventy one and running H. J.
Hines Company. He are more likely his chief food scientist GF.
Mason got the idea to use ripe tomatoes. Previously, they've
been using green and yellow in hopes that they'd last longer,
resulting in a brownish type sauce that they would then
(24:23):
die red um and these red tomatoes they have more pectin.
He also upped the vinegar and his product, which which
helped it last longer, and added sugar. He was so
confident in his product he sold it with the money
back guarantee. Now that it no longer had preservatives, it
was seen as sort of a health product again, and
(24:44):
it was marketed as tomato ketchup. And part of the
recipe that Mason came up with was really processed, not
ingredients like clean manufacturing practices and quality control. What's weird,
but but let's let's back up just a little bit here.
So Hines had gotten his start bottling and selling horse
(25:04):
ranish that his mother made a humble business that by
the nineties had grown into a large food processing firm.
The story goes around that time he got the idea
to market Hines fifty seven varieties matchup from a sign
in New York City advertising twenty one varieties of shoes,
and he thought that adding a number was a cool
(25:25):
idea and that fifty seven was a cool number, possibly
because it combined his favorite number five with his wife's
favorite number seven. Okay, although, to be fair, when he
first started marketing at the company already produced over sixty products,
so there were certainly enough varieties to count. Most of
it wasn't types of catchup though. It was like rice
flakes and olives and pickles and mustard and vinegars and
(25:46):
stuff like that. Hines seems like he was this legit
good person who genuinely cared about people's health and welfare
and about making money, and he managed to turn his
enthusiasm for that first thing into like a lot of
that second thing. In the late eighteen hundreds, he was
giving his factory employees free access to medical and dental care,
(26:10):
on site emergency care, and life and death insurance. The
company provided uniforms and laundry service, and washrooms and on
site manicures to make sure that employees came to the
line clean. They didn't just get a lunch break. There
was art in the cafeteria. The Pittsburgh factory had a
swimming pool, a gymnasium, and a rooftop garden. I kind
(26:30):
of want to bottle ketchup in the eighteen hundreds in Pennsylvania.
It sounds lovely, right and Hines what was marketing this?
He He opened his factories to public tours. He sold
his products in clear glass bottles. He hired traveling salesman
to display Hines products in local grocery stores like on China,
with fine linen and a spouse. The quality of these foods.
(26:52):
They were more expensive, but they were purer and amidst
all of this, Dr Wiley, who by the end of
the century was the chief chemist at the Federal Bureau
of Chemistry, was on this public campaign to bring pure
foods to the public by regulating the ever increasingly industrial
(27:13):
food industry. He hired a poison squad that apparently voluntarily
ate whatever he gave them to help him prove that
highly processed foods made under unsanitary conditions were bad for
your health. Oh wow, they volunteered apparently, Yeah, government employees.
Good times. Uh. He went on speaking tours railing against
(27:36):
big business cost cutters as the hosts of Satan, and
promoting a pure food act as necessary for the survival
of the human race. He had quite a rhetoric. The
public and perhaps especially religious folks connected with the larger
temperance movement loved it. They were super into this, apparently
(27:58):
to to get then President Teddy rose Belt on board.
He pointed to fillers being used in Scotch, so you know,
whatever works. And Hines was also all about it, you know, like,
oh man, you want to pass some laws demanding sanitary
manufacturing conditions, come at me, bro I'm ready. The company
(28:22):
was already a leader there and would nothing but profit
at forcing their competitors to start shaping up. Hines's son, Howard,
who by that time was working in the company, was
quoted as telling Roosevelt that such laws would inspire a
confidence in commercially prepared foods, and as my company would
get its full share of the larger business in helping
the industry, we should be helping ourselves. Mm hmmm. And
(28:46):
then Upton Sinclair's The Jungle came out, yeah, in February
of and all all of this kind of like simmering
upset at all of the malpractice going on in the
food manufacturing industry came to a boil. The Pure Food
and Drug Act would be passed in June of that year.
(29:08):
It enforced proper labeling of ingredients on packaging and paved
the way for the Food and Drug Administration to be created.
It's astounding ketchup ketchup um. And after this, ketch ups
popularity really increased, especially after the American Civil War Merchants
Review named ketchup the sauce of sauces in the New
(29:30):
York Tribune named ketch up the national condiment of eighteen
six quote on every table in the land, and Hines
really cornered the market. Five million bottles sold by nineteen
o five. By nineteen o eight, they'd sold two point
five million dollars worth. According to Hines, to separate himself
from his confeditors, he chose the spelling ketchup, as they
(29:52):
mentioned at the top, instead of Catsup. The more and
more ketchup people bought from stores, the less and less
recipes for it appeared in cook Hinz company was pouring
money into morality based ketchup advertising after that Pure Food
and Drug Act passed, and that's part of how they
started making so much more money. UH. One ad read
(30:14):
you can avoid the danger of drugged food by getting
Hines pure food products. Uh. Some ads apparently suggested that
the government was going to start confiscating any foods that
contained preservatives, so you know, grocers should start replacing their
stock with Hines products. Stat whoa that was? That was
not true. Then in the nineteen thirties, Hines Company began
(30:36):
tomato breeding programs to create hybrids that were sturdier and
more prolific, and this would become huge, huge, Like by
the nineties, they had started commercially selling seeds, and hind
Seed became the market leader in tomato seeds. They started
out looking for disease resistant tomatoes, but the research capacity
(30:57):
that they set up let them flow with all kinds
of different marketing changes over the next few decades. For example,
in nineteen sixty five, mechanical tomato harvesters became available, which
would greatly reduce the time and cost of picking tomatoes
if you had a crop that could withstand the force
of the machine a little bit rougher than a human picker.
(31:18):
So Hines developed that crop. These days, they developed hundreds
of new tomato varieties every year and choose a few
to advance on. Wow. Well, uh, speaking of Wow and
Nixon made headlines in sixteen not sixteen and nineteen sixty nine.
It came out that his breakfast of choice was cottage
(31:41):
cheese and ketchup. And when I read that, I made
a very loud, audible sound of disgust that drew worry
from my nearby co workers. It's not the worst thing
I've ever thought of, but I don't like thinking about it. No,
it's just not a pleasant image or taste sensation in
my brain. Let's move on. Individual ketchup backets came on
(32:05):
the scene in nineteen Two years later, in nineteen seventy,
the thirty two ounce bottle is introduced. By the nineteen eighties,
ketchup is the butt of a joke in pulp fiction
and the source of letters of advice to and landers.
My husband is eating too much ketchup by where he's uncultured.
I did read it, and I got kind of a
(32:26):
laugh out of it. And under Reagan, the US government
attempted to get ketchup classified as a vegetable to meet
the vegetable component of school lunch requirements. Hi, yeah, YEAHI
The plastic squeeze bottle came out in nineteen eighties three.
There are innovations ongoing, some were successful than others. In
(32:49):
two thousand, there was a green Ketchup and pink and
blue and teal and orange and purple, and in two
thousand two, the upside down Ketchup bottle. Those upside down
bottles are quick with a specially designed silicone valve with
slits arranged at right angles to each other so that
they part with pressure with a squeeze of the bottle
and seal back up when relaxed. Keep your Ketchup fresher.
(33:11):
Oh And then, in amidst public concerns about corn syrups
pervasive use as a sweetener, both Hines and other leading
brand Hunts started offering ketchups sweetened with sugar instead of
high frucdose corn syrup. Hunts replaced high frucdose corn syrup
across their entire line of ketchups, while Hines introduced a
(33:32):
ketchup called Simply Hines, which had reduced sodium and replaced
the corn syrup. And according to research, albeit from the
corn industry, this is a good case study about how
consumers care more about the amount of added sweeteners and
a product overall than than what kind of sweeteners being used.
But sales numbers do appear to bear that out, and
Hunts eventually went back to using high frucdose corn syrup
(33:55):
after a dip in sales. Huh. Hines meanwhile, put extra
money into that breeding research and development to build a
sweeter tomato and reduce dependence on corn syrup overall. Huh.
That's very interesting catchup? Who knew? Uh? That is our
(34:18):
history portion. But ketchup has more surprises for us in
a science bit, and more about that after one last
quick break for a word from our sponsor, and we're back,
(34:40):
Thank you sponsor. Okay, Lauren, let's talk about non Newtonian fluids.
Is this like non Euclidean geometry? Do I need to
be scared? Terrified? Oh? Heck, she's very scared. I can
tell no, it's not scary at all. Uh. As I
mentioned earlier, the fifty seven part of HINS fifty seven,
(35:01):
Ketchup is definitely just a just a marketing thing, but
the placement of the fifty seven label on the bottle
is absolutely not. And that's because ketchup is a non
Newtonian fluid. Really, let's unpack that. A Newtonian fluid is
one that has a viscosity, a thickness, or a resistance
to flowing related only to its temperature. Water and oil
(35:24):
are Newtonian fluids. Uh you know, pressure and non heat
related agitation don't affect the rate of which they flow.
So like, no matter how hard you shake water, it
always flows the same way, right right right. This has
nothing to do with density, mind you. Like honey is
both more dense and more viscous than water. It takes
(35:45):
longer to pour and it's also heavier. It'll it'll sink
and tea or something like that. But think of cream.
It takes longer to pour than water, so it's more viscous,
but it would also float on top of water anyway.
Unlike water and other Newtonian fluids, non Newtonian fluids are
affected by pressure and agitation. Think about quicksand or Okay,
(36:10):
maybe you've never really thought about quicksand, but it's about
twice as dense as you are, meaning that you can
float on top of it, but only if you don't struggle.
If you struggle in quicksand, you agitate it and it
makes it less viscous and you'll sink. That is why
you should always stay calm and move slowly should you
get trapped in quicksand Survival tip of the episode you
(36:33):
here on food stuff exactly where you expect to get
your quicksand survival tips. You should also stay calm and
move slowly if you ever get trapped in toothpaste or
catch up. More practically, though, you can put this to
use when you're trying to get catchup out of a
glass bottle. Uh, it's so viscous that it gets jammed
(36:53):
up at the neck. But by applying agitation sheer stress,
that is, to the ketchup at the neck, you can
make it less viscous and it will flow faster. And
you can do that by just tapping the neck of
the bottle right on that fifty seven label, or if
you're using different brands, sort of like midway up the
glass neck, tapping it at the bottom of the bottle
(37:14):
does not work because that only affects the viscosity of
the ketchup at the bottom of the bottle, which is
not where the problem is, right, And yet that's what
almost all of us do. Yeah, it seems it seems illogical.
It does, doesn't it. Nope, not logical at all, according
to non Newtonian fluid physics, I say it again, catchup. Um.
(37:35):
You may also have seen videos online about how you
can use ketchup to clean or polish things, particularly on
objects that are metal because of the acidity and the
tomatoes and the vinegars. From the things I read, because
I have never tried this, it can clean pots and
pans and minutes. It can remove the tarnish off copper.
It's good for polishing brass and steel shining cars. And
(37:59):
I do kind of want to try it because for me,
putting ketchup on something, it's gonna make it worse. But
I believe that it is true. Um. I think they'll
I'll start really small with like a penny. Yeah, maybe
not like an antique or anything like my my cousin's
very nice car or something. Oh yeah, probably not that. No,
(38:19):
I just put ketchup on your car. It's gonna be fine. Um.
And if you want to make it, it's relatively easy
to make and to customize to your own taste, should
you be interested. The consistency is a little tricky to imitate,
but it's totally worth your while if you're a ketchup
fan and recipes abound online or worth worth your while,
(38:40):
I don't know. I I was talking with a with
a food industry friend about this before we came in here,
not immediately before we came in, and it's not like
hiding in the office. But there's a little bit of
of an argument in the food industry about whether or
not one should make their own house catch up. I
have heard that yet, because yeah, because the flavor of
ketchup is so when people ask times yeah, and so
(39:03):
anything else is kind of I mean, it can be delightful, yes,
but it's like, oh, this doesn't taste like ketchup, and
that's a lot of people's experiences, I think making it
at home, they're like, well, this is nice, but right.
I definitely think that in restaurants you are running a
risk if you don't offer also bottled ketchup, because people
will be angry that they're not getting what they what
they think of ketchup as um. But yeah, like I've
(39:27):
made it once and all I did was add like more,
I made it spici here and I liked it. But yeah,
if you're looking for hins like that sweet ketchup, you're
never gonna get it. Yeah, just buy it, just buy it.
That's why all the recipes, like we said, they started
disappearing out of the recipe books because people were like,
I want this thing and I can't do it, so
(39:48):
so even try al Ever, don't let that discourage you.
Should you want to try a different type of ketchup,
especially something like banana ketchup. Yeah, I know, I'm very
I really want to try that. Yeah, that's our catchup episode. Yes,
and that brings us to listeners. We really need to
(40:11):
record that one day because we all including Bill, and
we do like a hand motion look off in a direction. Yeah,
Dylan did really good muppet arms. Yeah, this one. It's
very exciting. Yeah, it is exciting, he wrote about our
cupcakes episode. I worked at a typical East Coast dinner
for a couple of years in college, and we always
had muffins, which I was like, why who would pick
(40:32):
a muffin? Well, I had an order for a muffin
and I found out that you can grill them on
the flat top, which makes any muffin amazing. The cooks
would slice it down the middle, spread on some butter,
and lay them down onto the hot flat top and
cover them for a couple of minutes. What you get
is a warmed up muffin that now has a crispy,
savory kind of French toast side to it. Listeners can
(40:55):
do it at home with a good hot pan on
snowtop two. Definitely elevates the muffin game aim and great
for the day olds you probably don't want to eat
by themselves. That sounds really good. I want to do
that right now. I gotta say I've appreciated everyone who's
written in about Team Muffin or Team Cupcakes. It's been excellent.
Christie wrote, just listened to your banana episode. I don't
(41:18):
know how true it is, but my husband, who has
worked on boats most of his life, once told me
that bananas were bad luck on ships because of the
ethylene gas they omit while ripening. When stored in large
amounts in small spaces, this does not make a great combo.
If the bananas are kept with other fruits or veggies,
the gas causes them to ripen too quickly. This is
also why you can put a bunch of unripe bananas
(41:40):
in a paper bag to help them ripen faster. True story. Also,
banana bunches like to house bugs, spiders, et cetera, which
are incredibly hard to get rid of on vessels. Fun
ish fact. We used to work on private yachts, and
when we got supplies, if it came in a cardboard
cardboard box, it had to be unloaded before coming on
board because roaches and other bugs like to lay eggs
(42:01):
in the corrugated cardboard. This maybe where the crabbers and
fisherman got the superstition of bananas are bad on boats. Yeah,
I could see that, absolutely. No, I certainly I don't
want any of those things. And um also thank you
Christie for my landlord wants. Um gave me a bit
(42:22):
of a slap on the wrist for keeping around too
many cardboard boxes. He said cockroaches like to lay eggs
on them, and I was kind of like, really, but
it seems that at least he didn't just make it
up as I suspected. I hope you're not listening, but
if you are, hello, Landlord. I did get rid of
(42:44):
the boxes. Yeah, we'll see you're doing such a good job.
I did. I absolutely did. Oh boy. Anyway, that brings
us to the end of this episode. But if you
would like to write them and think thanks to both
of them for writing you can. Our email is food
Stuff at how stuff works dot com, where also on
social media you can find us on Twitter and Facebook
(43:06):
at food Stuff h s W and on Instagram at
food Stuff. Thank you so much to our amazing producer,
Dylan Fagan, and to you for listening, and we hope
that lots more good things are coming your way
Hello, and welcome to food Stuff. I'm Anyrees and I'm
Lauren bogel Bum and today we're talking about Ketchup. Oh yes,
way more about Ketchup than I thought was there. It's
really fascinating, it really is. It touched on so many
things I never would have guessed. It's part of the
reason why we have the f d A. Yeah, it
(00:30):
really is. It's such a fascinating story. And it's also
one of my weirdest favorite foods that I have one
of your favorite foods in general, or I've I've kind
of grown out of it. But when I was a kid,
I would eat ketchup sandwiches, and I think that's a
common kid thing to do. I've never heard of it,
(00:53):
but I'm I wouldn't be surprised because kids do like
those weird things like pickled juice. I feel like kids
really like pickle juice anyway. I would also I preferred
ketchup to French fries that I knew it wasn't socially
acceptable to just get catch up ketchup, so I would
order fries and then not really eat them and just
kind of like try to be subtle about the fact
(01:14):
that I was mostly eating, just catch up up until
what age? Because you say that you ordered the fries,
so you were old enough to be like verbal and
perhaps like have your own money. Yeah, I was definitely.
I remember very vividly being called out on this in college.
(01:34):
That's amazing. Yeah, I also like ketchup. I can't profess
to have that level. Well, it's weird and it's It
brings me to a topic I really want to talk
about one day, is why do we like the foods
we like? Because that's strange. I know that's strange. Why
is my body like? Yeah, ketchup, get me more of this.
(01:57):
It's very bizarre. But anyway, we should are talking about
what it is. It's right, ketch up. What is it?
It's a condiment that uses tomatoes as a base, usually
with vinegar, sweetener, and spices like onions, are garlic. Other
common spices include pepper, cayenne, pepper, paprika, also a pepper, mustard, cloves, allspice,
and cinnamon. And you can find it pretty much on
(02:21):
every hamburger, every hot dog or not. I've I've found
some very heated opinions about that one. I have a
very heated opinion about that one. Do you remind me
to ask you about it later? Um, every diner table
in the US at least, um, or is it dipping
sauce for front fries or pretty much any kind of
potatoes and potato product, right, Yeah, And as far as
(02:42):
taste goes, I'm going to imagine you've had it, but
if you haven't, it's kind of a sweet, savory, sort
of twangy barbecue sauce esque taste. Sure. Yeah. Oh, and
we like to talk about spelling on this podcast. It's
a great audio of things I know, isn't it. It's
so fun to explain. But so you've probably seen catchup
(03:07):
k E T c h up. That's the more common spelling,
but also cats up like c A T s e
P still pronounced catchup. Yeah, but I say in my
head though, it's cats up too, And basically the reason
this whole thing exists, Um, it was mostly cats up
until Hynes of Catchup fame came along and wanted to
(03:29):
stand out from the crowd, and they marketed their product
as ketchup. Yeah. More on that a little bit later. Oh, yes,
but first, how do we get catch up? Does it
spring fourth whole from I'm not sure what it would
spring forth from. I don't like what's what's what's the
zeus of of of catchup of condiments? Oh, the first condiment.
(03:51):
I don't know if a condment family tree would be
very interesting. Actually, okay regardless. Um, first you've got to
grow some tomatoes. Those tomatoes are then graded and the
ones that pass ketchup mustard are washed, chopped, and scaled.
That is pre cooked for preservation and sterilization purposes. Then
you pump them into a cyclone. It's a it's an
(04:13):
industry term for a machine that separates and filters the
pulp and the juice out from all the stems and
skins and seeds. Still cool, Still pretty cool. Yeah. You
then cook the pulp for about thirty minutes, adding in
various flavorings as you go. The whole thing is then
filtered through a finishing machine to get rid of any
chunks um and or maybe milled for texture consistency. Excess
(04:38):
air is removed and it's packaged hot to prevent bacteria growth,
then cooled to prevent flavor loss from from overcooking. M hmm.
And there is a crazy amount of science that goes
into when you add different flavorings and in what formats.
Uh Onions and garlic can be steeped in in bags
like like tea. Spices can be added ground or as
(05:00):
essential oils. Adding your sugar too soon can create a
burnt taste, and vinegar and any oils will evaporate if
you let them cook too long. There's a lot going
on there. There's a lot going on there, more more
than I had personally thought about previous to reading long
industry papers. I really thought it was just like blended
tomatoes with sugar in there. Right, no, very complicated. Kind
(05:22):
of makes me appreciate it more. Speaking of sugars, there
has been something of an industry kerfuffle over the type
of sweeteners used in Ketchup, partially because your typical tomato
Ketchup is almost a quarter sugar by weight. As health
professionals and the public at large have become more concerned
about added sugars, sneaky sugar foods like Ketchup have become
a target, and so different brands use different types, from
(05:45):
beat sugar to high fructose corn syrup. Oh man, we
need to do an episode about high fructose corn syrup sometime.
We do. I feel like We've tackled a lot of
sweetening things because we're just so into it, so into
things tasting sweet. But yes, I freaked toast corn syrup. Yeah.
And speaking of health, um, it's complicated. Ketchup is about
(06:10):
fifteen calories per tablespoon, and each tablespoon has about four
grams of sugar, mostly from added sugars, although the label
doesn't differentiate between added and natural sugars because tomatoes do
have but we I think we can we can guess
it's mostly added. Yeah. Um, and eight tablespoons of ketchup
will put you at the recommended daily sodium limit. I
(06:32):
feel like you could get to eight pretty quickly. You
could certainly get um. It does have some vitamin A,
vitamin C, and lycopene. A two thousand four study from
the Harvard School of Public Health suggested that women who
had elevated blood levels of lycopene lower their risk Aparte
disease by fi UM. I think it's also been there's
(06:54):
studies about it being good for preventing cancer. Mmm. So
people use at as an excuse to eat more Ketchup
and catch up companies capitalized on it as well. But
as we often say on this show bodies are complicated,
more research is needed, and there are better ways to
get your lecopine than catch up, probably like tomatoes. Um. Okay,
we don't say that last bit too often, but it's
(07:16):
still true. It's still true. Yes, if we look at
catchup by the numbers of US households reported having a
bottle of Ketchup in the refrigerator in Yeah, Americans buy
about ten billion ounces a year, which comes out to
around three bottles per person, which is a lot of ketchup. Yeah.
(07:41):
I kind of wonder, like, I don't know why, but
meat loaf or or things recipes that have catch up
Because for me it's a condiment. I'm not using it
in recipes, but I bet if you used it for
something like that, I don't know. Thoughts for another podcast.
We do make most of our catch up here, but
also import a lot from Cada. This is way more
(08:02):
Ketchup than the rest of the world consumes, by the way,
as we were responsible for about thirty seven of the
global ketchup market. Wow. Of course, there there are other
tomato based condiments in other countries, but ketchup is very local.
According to the U s d A and unopened bottle
of Ketchup will last a year in your pantry, and
(08:23):
an opened one a month, and if you refrigerate them,
an opened bottle is good for six months. I feel
like I've had the bottle of Ketchup in my refrigerator
for far longer than that. Oh yeah, I can't, I
shuddered to think. Moving on, if we just look at
Hines branded Ketchup per year, they sell six hundred fifty
(08:45):
million bottles. They are I believe the leader of the industry. Well,
I mean, there's certainly the leader in the industry is
a single brand, but I think about like fifty of
the Ketchup that we buy as Hines. Yeah, I would
believe it. Salt Out sold Ketchup for the first time
a couple of years ago. I know. Ketchup is currently
(09:06):
the third best selling condiment in the US, behind salsa
and the number one mayonnaise, which is one of my
four foods that I don't like. Really, yeah, I totally
forgot about it because I just never have mayonnaise. Until
I was reading this, I was like, oh, oh, yeah,
I'll see. I like dipping my fries and mayonnaise. I
(09:28):
can understand it. And I watch people in the joy
in their eyes, and I wish I could. I wish
I could enjoy it, but sometimes I like it mixed
in other things, you know. Okay, alright, it's not a
total alright, yeah, we'll have to okay, whole other again,
whole other episodes. Okay, um uh yeah. The greatest share
of the ketchup market is not the home market, which
we have just been talking about, but the fast food industry.
(09:51):
Different analysts are reporting different futures for the market, with
maybe decreases in the United States as young consumers are
shying away from sational fast food, but increases globally as
the global middle class kind of expands and French fries
are eaten by more other people. This is true. You're
welcome world, Yeah, question mark. In the United States, ketchup,
(10:19):
no matter how you spell it, has been defined specifically
as tomato ketchup since at least the nineties, like legally,
but there's been all kinds of flavors of ketchup. Banana
ketchup using bananas in the place of tomatoes is popular
in the Philippines. In our fridge at work, there is
saracha ketchup. I find that interesting. Uh, there's pear, sweet mustard,
(10:41):
also funny mango, cranberry, carrot, apple, plum, goes on and on,
cucumber and grape. Where the two great that I ran across.
I'm not sure what that looks like. But yeah. Oh,
by the way, what makes some ketchup fancy? If it's
homemade and you're at a hipster rip stock? No, well,
(11:01):
I mean that too, but no, it's a grading term.
The U s d A defines three grades of ketchup
see through A or standard, extra standard, which is a
great phrase, and fancy um Better color, consistency and uniformity
make better grades of ketchup. So fancy catchup is the
best noted. The world's largest Ketchup bottle, because you know
(11:25):
there is one is located in Collinsville, Illinois, which at
one time was home of the largest Ketchup bottling plant.
It's a combination water tower ketchup bottle that measures in
total one and seventy feet or fifty two meters, and
it has quite the fan club. There's literally a fan club. Um,
(11:47):
it's got a website and an annual festival. It looks
really cool and I love ketchup. So who field chip
always every episode, how We're going to fit in all
these field chips. It was built way back in nine
forty nine. It was almost torn down in the nineteen
nineties after the town's ketchup operations were moved elsewhere and
the property that it sits on was sold, but a
(12:09):
restoration and preservation effort saved it still there. The same
town also built the world's the world's largest ketchup packet,
and this one actually held ketchup onlike this water tower,
which never was never filled with ketchup. To my personal knowledge,
um about a hundred and twenty seven gallons went into
the world's largest ketchup packet. That's about four and eighty
(12:31):
one leaders. It measured four by eight feet or one
point two by two point four meters, and to fill it,
Hines donated four thousand normal ketchup bottles to the town.
The town sold the chance to to pour those bottles
in for a buck apiece to raise money for a
local school. Okay, and the packet, hypothetically and unless someone
(12:55):
something has changed, lives at the Hines corporate headquarters in
Pittsburgh and listed in the Guinness Book of Records as
the world's largest condiment satchet satchet sachet that it's not
a term I would have used, but I do enjoy it.
And one more record for you. The fastest anyone has
drank a bottle of ketchup on record, anyway, is in
(13:19):
twenty five point three seven seconds. The record holder used
a straw. Oh man, see, I like ketchup and my
stomach is not on board with that. Yeah. I made
the same face that Annie is making right now when
I read about that one. There's a photograph attached. It's great,
as all of this might indicate, ketchup today is seen rightfully,
(13:42):
so I would say has very much an American condiment.
But that was not always the case, and the first
catchups were not invented in the US. Nope. The story
of ketchup is frequently described as a prime example of
globalization and shifting global political power. Catch Up, catch up? Yep.
(14:03):
More on that after a quick break for a word
from our sponsor, and we're back. Thank you, sponsor, Yes,
thank you. Let's start our history segment with one of
our favorite things, etymology. Yes, catch up. We're so excited
(14:28):
about it. I hope that you were just as pumped
as we are. Catch Up probably comes from the Chinese
word which, um, what did kits yap mean? You ask?
It was the name for a fermented fish sauce. That's
the car going off the road. By the way, I'm
(14:50):
really good at sound offense. Yeah. Wait wait so fish
fish sauce. Yeah, fermented fish, fermented fish back Darya poo.
I know another thing we love. Yes, Ketchup in its
original form did not have tomatoes. If you've ever looked
at a catchup bottle, and I'm guessing you have, maybe
you recall it. The label reads tomato ketchup, which, until
(15:13):
someone pointed this out when I was researching it, I
had never never like clicked yeah that it does in
fact say tomato ketchup, as in ketchup isn't or it
wasn't always tomato based. The first written mention of a
fermented fish paste our sauce in China dates back to
three BC. It might be made with fish and trails,
(15:34):
meat by products, or soy beans, and the things I
read said it was good at complimenting savory flavors. I
feel like fish sauce. There's there's a whole garum thing
in Roman times. Need to anyway, Yeah, please continue, here's
one of the first recipes from five four BC. Take
the intestine, stomach and bladder of the yellow fish, shark
(15:57):
and mullet and wash them well, mix them with a
moderate amount of salt, and place them in a jar
sealed tightly, and incubate in the sun. It will be
ready in twenty days in summer, fifty days in spring
our fall, and in one hundred days in winter. Who
incubate in the sun? I do. I've never had a
(16:18):
recipe that said incubate and the sun preferably far away
from anywhere where you hang out, I would imagine, But
then someone might steal here. You can't. So this sauce
stored and kept easily, meaning it was popular on long
journeys and trade routes. From China. It traveled to Malaysia
(16:40):
and Indonesia via traders picking up the names could chop
and catch chop, respectively. After sailors from England encountered it
in the seventeenth century, they tried to recreate the condiment
in their own country. The word catch up like catch
c A T C H plus up you pee was
first record did in the New Dictionary of the terms
(17:02):
Ancient and modern of the canting crew the title with
the description High East India Sauce. In sixt a British
merchant gave this advice on buying ketchup. Soy comes in
tubs from Japan and the best ketchup from northern Vietnam.
Yet good of both sorts are made and sold very
(17:24):
cheap in China. I know not a more profitable commodity.
Wow in seventy seven are in some places I read?
It appeared in the seventeen fifty reprint The Complete Housewife
included a recipe for a sauce called English ketchup, made
out of twelve to fourteen anchovi's, ten to twelve shallots,
(17:45):
white wine, vineager, white wine, mace, ginger clothes, whole peppers,
a whole nutmeg, lemon peel, and horse radis mixed together
and then shaking a bottle once or twice a day
for a week and toda. This recipe was frequently reprinted
up until the nineteenth century, so people must have liked it.
And key here too. Something I I forget a lot um.
(18:07):
People didn't have refrigeration at this time, right, so you
either had like cold ish sellar. Right are we're making
this like shrug, yeah, you fresh food exactly. So, just
like the sailors, they appreciated the long shelf life of ketchup,
and early attempts to recreate ketchup in England included beer, because,
(18:29):
of course they did, of course they did a little
over a decade later in the seventeen forties, spiced sauce,
as ketchup was known in England was a regular condiment
at the dinner table. Still not how we'd think of it,
though the consistency was thinner, the color was a lot darker,
and on top of the stuff we just mentioned in
that recipe, the English might add cinnamon, mustard, seeds are chien,
(18:52):
pepper or walnuts, oysters, muscles, celery, plums, peaches, or mushrooms.
Jane Austen was a fan of mushroom ketchup. Another sip
I found called for not one, not to but one
hundred oysters, three points of white wine, lemon peels and
mace and clothes. That's a lot of oysters. That is many,
(19:17):
okay h. It wasn't until eighteen twelve that the first
recipe for ketchup using tomatoes was published, courtesy of James
mice Nice was a horticulturist and a scientist, and the
recipe referred to tomatoes as love apples. That's one of
my favorite episodes. That was such a good one. Uh. Anyway,
(19:38):
who knows how long Mes worked on perfecting his tomato ketchup,
because he mentioned it in eighteen o four, eight years earlier,
and he mentioned it that he believed love apples would
make a fine catsup. I'm just gonna use cats up
to differentiate so I don't have to spell it every time.
(19:58):
One thing I read positive that all of the things
added and ketchup at this time, and currently tomatoes, mushrooms,
oysters are big on that fifth taste or savory yeah,
which I thought was interesting. Meanwhile, speaking of our tomato episode,
tomatoes were growing in popularity around this time. There was
this kind of stunt that happened in eighteen twenty in
(20:20):
which one Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson stood on the steps
of a local New Jersey courthouse and eight tomatoes. He
just went through tomatoes until the crowd, which had gathered,
which was convinced that they were poisonous, was like, Oh,
I guess, I guess he's fine. I guess they're not poisons.
I guess they're not poisonous this whole time. Yeah, yeah,
(20:42):
it's a great it's a great story and uh you
can check out our tomato episode to learn more. And
if you haven't heard it, I highly recommend it. Recipes
for ketchup or tomato soy as it was now called,
were present in many of the first American cookbooks, including
The Virginia Housewife by Mary Randolph around eighteen thirty four,
(21:02):
and Ohio and doctor John Cook. Bennett got the idea
that tomatoes were this universal gut pansia that they could
like treat all sorts of digestion problems, and he started
publishing recipes for tomato ketchup, which was then concentrated into
pillform and sold as patent medicine. It's kind of fascinating
(21:25):
how it went from don't eat these SNAs pores and
it will kill you too. Here their medicinal take a
film very quickly, humans are we can just pop around
in that mind um. Miss Beaton's book of household Management
and eighteen sixty one bestseller King with several ketchup recipes,
mostly of the mushroom and oyster variety, and over the
(21:48):
next few decades, tomato ketchups medicinal popularity would grow to
the point that people apparently thought of tomato ketchup as
being like a health tonic. Wow. There was a problem
odd on by addition of tomatoes, though, it didn't preserve
as well, and that whole long lasting thing was an
enormous part of ketchups appeal. The tomato growing season was
(22:10):
short too, so growers needed a way to keep tomato
preserves all year long. A lot of companies attempted to
commercialize tomato ketchup, but they ran into a a lot
of problems, sometimes deadly ones with yeast, mold, and bacteria.
Oh and they also contained cold tar to get that
(22:30):
red color, and boric acid that were not good for
you know, um, Okay. The thing here is that you
had like two months out of the year to produce
fresh tomato pulp for catchup, and you couldn't make a
year supply of catchup very quickly, and you didn't have
good refrigeration or even reliable canning technology yet, so you
(22:53):
wound up with people adding various chemicals to preserve the pulp.
Stuff that is not super good for you. Boric acid formula,
which is a solution of formaldehyde and water um benzoic acid. Also,
the acids in ketchups would interact with the copper tubs
that they were often cooked in. Uh huh. In eighteen
sixty six, Pierre Blott, a French cookbook author, called commercially
(23:16):
available ketchup filthy, decomposed, and putrid. A study out of
California conducted in eight six found that ketchup brands contained
injurious ingredients like salasilic acid, you know, like known carcinogens,
known carcinogens in the eighteen hundreds. Something had to be
pretty bad at that anyway. Yeah. One of the guys
(23:40):
leading the effort to rid ketchup of benzoates was Dr
Harvey Washington Wiley. Oh man, this guy, Yeah, more on
him in a minute. But he was so passionate about
this that in eighteen seventy six he joined forces with
a fella in Pittsburgh named Henry J. Hydes, Yes that Hides,
(24:01):
who by that time was already making ketchup. He started
selling the stuff in eighteen seventy one and running H. J.
Hines Company. He are more likely his chief food scientist GF.
Mason got the idea to use ripe tomatoes. Previously, they've
been using green and yellow in hopes that they'd last longer,
resulting in a brownish type sauce that they would then
(24:23):
die red um and these red tomatoes they have more pectin.
He also upped the vinegar and his product, which which
helped it last longer, and added sugar. He was so
confident in his product he sold it with the money
back guarantee. Now that it no longer had preservatives, it
was seen as sort of a health product again, and
(24:44):
it was marketed as tomato ketchup. And part of the
recipe that Mason came up with was really processed, not
ingredients like clean manufacturing practices and quality control. What's weird,
but but let's let's back up just a little bit here.
So Hines had gotten his start bottling and selling horse
(25:04):
ranish that his mother made a humble business that by
the nineties had grown into a large food processing firm.
The story goes around that time he got the idea
to market Hines fifty seven varieties matchup from a sign
in New York City advertising twenty one varieties of shoes,
and he thought that adding a number was a cool
(25:25):
idea and that fifty seven was a cool number, possibly
because it combined his favorite number five with his wife's
favorite number seven. Okay, although, to be fair, when he
first started marketing at the company already produced over sixty products,
so there were certainly enough varieties to count. Most of
it wasn't types of catchup though. It was like rice
flakes and olives and pickles and mustard and vinegars and
(25:46):
stuff like that. Hines seems like he was this legit
good person who genuinely cared about people's health and welfare
and about making money, and he managed to turn his
enthusiasm for that first thing into like a lot of
that second thing. In the late eighteen hundreds, he was
giving his factory employees free access to medical and dental care,
(26:10):
on site emergency care, and life and death insurance. The
company provided uniforms and laundry service, and washrooms and on
site manicures to make sure that employees came to the
line clean. They didn't just get a lunch break. There
was art in the cafeteria. The Pittsburgh factory had a
swimming pool, a gymnasium, and a rooftop garden. I kind
(26:30):
of want to bottle ketchup in the eighteen hundreds in Pennsylvania.
It sounds lovely, right and Hines what was marketing this?
He He opened his factories to public tours. He sold
his products in clear glass bottles. He hired traveling salesman
to display Hines products in local grocery stores like on China,
with fine linen and a spouse. The quality of these foods.
(26:52):
They were more expensive, but they were purer and amidst
all of this, Dr Wiley, who by the end of
the century was the chief chemist at the Federal Bureau
of Chemistry, was on this public campaign to bring pure
foods to the public by regulating the ever increasingly industrial
(27:13):
food industry. He hired a poison squad that apparently voluntarily
ate whatever he gave them to help him prove that
highly processed foods made under unsanitary conditions were bad for
your health. Oh wow, they volunteered apparently, Yeah, government employees.
Good times. Uh. He went on speaking tours railing against
(27:36):
big business cost cutters as the hosts of Satan, and
promoting a pure food act as necessary for the survival
of the human race. He had quite a rhetoric. The
public and perhaps especially religious folks connected with the larger
temperance movement loved it. They were super into this, apparently
(27:58):
to to get then President Teddy rose Belt on board.
He pointed to fillers being used in Scotch, so you know,
whatever works. And Hines was also all about it, you know, like,
oh man, you want to pass some laws demanding sanitary
manufacturing conditions, come at me, bro I'm ready. The company
(28:22):
was already a leader there and would nothing but profit
at forcing their competitors to start shaping up. Hines's son, Howard,
who by that time was working in the company, was
quoted as telling Roosevelt that such laws would inspire a
confidence in commercially prepared foods, and as my company would
get its full share of the larger business in helping
the industry, we should be helping ourselves. Mm hmmm. And
(28:46):
then Upton Sinclair's The Jungle came out, yeah, in February
of and all all of this kind of like simmering
upset at all of the malpractice going on in the
food manufacturing industry came to a boil. The Pure Food
and Drug Act would be passed in June of that year.
(29:08):
It enforced proper labeling of ingredients on packaging and paved
the way for the Food and Drug Administration to be created.
It's astounding ketchup ketchup um. And after this, ketch ups
popularity really increased, especially after the American Civil War Merchants
Review named ketchup the sauce of sauces in the New
(29:30):
York Tribune named ketch up the national condiment of eighteen
six quote on every table in the land, and Hines
really cornered the market. Five million bottles sold by nineteen
o five. By nineteen o eight, they'd sold two point
five million dollars worth. According to Hines, to separate himself
from his confeditors, he chose the spelling ketchup, as they
(29:52):
mentioned at the top, instead of Catsup. The more and
more ketchup people bought from stores, the less and less
recipes for it appeared in cook Hinz company was pouring
money into morality based ketchup advertising after that Pure Food
and Drug Act passed, and that's part of how they
started making so much more money. UH. One ad read
(30:14):
you can avoid the danger of drugged food by getting
Hines pure food products. Uh. Some ads apparently suggested that
the government was going to start confiscating any foods that
contained preservatives, so you know, grocers should start replacing their
stock with Hines products. Stat whoa that was? That was
not true. Then in the nineteen thirties, Hines Company began
(30:36):
tomato breeding programs to create hybrids that were sturdier and
more prolific, and this would become huge, huge, Like by
the nineties, they had started commercially selling seeds, and hind
Seed became the market leader in tomato seeds. They started
out looking for disease resistant tomatoes, but the research capacity
(30:57):
that they set up let them flow with all kinds
of different marketing changes over the next few decades. For example,
in nineteen sixty five, mechanical tomato harvesters became available, which
would greatly reduce the time and cost of picking tomatoes
if you had a crop that could withstand the force
of the machine a little bit rougher than a human picker.
(31:18):
So Hines developed that crop. These days, they developed hundreds
of new tomato varieties every year and choose a few
to advance on. Wow. Well, uh, speaking of Wow and
Nixon made headlines in sixteen not sixteen and nineteen sixty nine.
It came out that his breakfast of choice was cottage
(31:41):
cheese and ketchup. And when I read that, I made
a very loud, audible sound of disgust that drew worry
from my nearby co workers. It's not the worst thing
I've ever thought of, but I don't like thinking about it. No,
it's just not a pleasant image or taste sensation in
my brain. Let's move on. Individual ketchup backets came on
(32:05):
the scene in nineteen Two years later, in nineteen seventy,
the thirty two ounce bottle is introduced. By the nineteen eighties,
ketchup is the butt of a joke in pulp fiction
and the source of letters of advice to and landers.
My husband is eating too much ketchup by where he's uncultured.
I did read it, and I got kind of a
(32:26):
laugh out of it. And under Reagan, the US government
attempted to get ketchup classified as a vegetable to meet
the vegetable component of school lunch requirements. Hi, yeah, YEAHI
The plastic squeeze bottle came out in nineteen eighties three.
There are innovations ongoing, some were successful than others. In
(32:49):
two thousand, there was a green Ketchup and pink and
blue and teal and orange and purple, and in two
thousand two, the upside down Ketchup bottle. Those upside down
bottles are quick with a specially designed silicone valve with
slits arranged at right angles to each other so that
they part with pressure with a squeeze of the bottle
and seal back up when relaxed. Keep your Ketchup fresher.
(33:11):
Oh And then, in amidst public concerns about corn syrups
pervasive use as a sweetener, both Hines and other leading
brand Hunts started offering ketchups sweetened with sugar instead of
high frucdose corn syrup. Hunts replaced high frucdose corn syrup
across their entire line of ketchups, while Hines introduced a
(33:32):
ketchup called Simply Hines, which had reduced sodium and replaced
the corn syrup. And according to research, albeit from the
corn industry, this is a good case study about how
consumers care more about the amount of added sweeteners and
a product overall than than what kind of sweeteners being used.
But sales numbers do appear to bear that out, and
Hunts eventually went back to using high frucdose corn syrup
(33:55):
after a dip in sales. Huh. Hines meanwhile, put extra
money into that breeding research and development to build a
sweeter tomato and reduce dependence on corn syrup overall. Huh.
That's very interesting catchup? Who knew? Uh? That is our
(34:18):
history portion. But ketchup has more surprises for us in
a science bit, and more about that after one last
quick break for a word from our sponsor, and we're back,
(34:40):
Thank you sponsor. Okay, Lauren, let's talk about non Newtonian fluids.
Is this like non Euclidean geometry? Do I need to
be scared? Terrified? Oh? Heck, she's very scared. I can
tell no, it's not scary at all. Uh. As I
mentioned earlier, the fifty seven part of HINS fifty seven,
(35:01):
Ketchup is definitely just a just a marketing thing, but
the placement of the fifty seven label on the bottle
is absolutely not. And that's because ketchup is a non
Newtonian fluid. Really, let's unpack that. A Newtonian fluid is
one that has a viscosity, a thickness, or a resistance
to flowing related only to its temperature. Water and oil
(35:24):
are Newtonian fluids. Uh you know, pressure and non heat
related agitation don't affect the rate of which they flow.
So like, no matter how hard you shake water, it
always flows the same way, right right right. This has
nothing to do with density, mind you. Like honey is
both more dense and more viscous than water. It takes
(35:45):
longer to pour and it's also heavier. It'll it'll sink
and tea or something like that. But think of cream.
It takes longer to pour than water, so it's more viscous,
but it would also float on top of water anyway.
Unlike water and other Newtonian fluids, non Newtonian fluids are
affected by pressure and agitation. Think about quicksand or Okay,
(36:10):
maybe you've never really thought about quicksand, but it's about
twice as dense as you are, meaning that you can
float on top of it, but only if you don't struggle.
If you struggle in quicksand, you agitate it and it
makes it less viscous and you'll sink. That is why
you should always stay calm and move slowly should you
get trapped in quicksand Survival tip of the episode you
(36:33):
here on food stuff exactly where you expect to get
your quicksand survival tips. You should also stay calm and
move slowly if you ever get trapped in toothpaste or
catch up. More practically, though, you can put this to
use when you're trying to get catchup out of a
glass bottle. Uh, it's so viscous that it gets jammed
(36:53):
up at the neck. But by applying agitation sheer stress,
that is, to the ketchup at the neck, you can
make it less viscous and it will flow faster. And
you can do that by just tapping the neck of
the bottle right on that fifty seven label, or if
you're using different brands, sort of like midway up the
glass neck, tapping it at the bottom of the bottle
(37:14):
does not work because that only affects the viscosity of
the ketchup at the bottom of the bottle, which is
not where the problem is, right, And yet that's what
almost all of us do. Yeah, it seems it seems illogical.
It does, doesn't it. Nope, not logical at all, according
to non Newtonian fluid physics, I say it again, catchup. Um.
(37:35):
You may also have seen videos online about how you
can use ketchup to clean or polish things, particularly on
objects that are metal because of the acidity and the
tomatoes and the vinegars. From the things I read, because
I have never tried this, it can clean pots and
pans and minutes. It can remove the tarnish off copper.
It's good for polishing brass and steel shining cars. And
(37:59):
I do kind of want to try it because for me,
putting ketchup on something, it's gonna make it worse. But
I believe that it is true. Um. I think they'll
I'll start really small with like a penny. Yeah, maybe
not like an antique or anything like my my cousin's
very nice car or something. Oh yeah, probably not that. No,
(38:19):
I just put ketchup on your car. It's gonna be fine. Um.
And if you want to make it, it's relatively easy
to make and to customize to your own taste, should
you be interested. The consistency is a little tricky to imitate,
but it's totally worth your while if you're a ketchup
fan and recipes abound online or worth worth your while,
(38:40):
I don't know. I I was talking with a with
a food industry friend about this before we came in here,
not immediately before we came in, and it's not like
hiding in the office. But there's a little bit of
of an argument in the food industry about whether or
not one should make their own house catch up. I
have heard that yet, because yeah, because the flavor of
ketchup is so when people ask times yeah, and so
(39:03):
anything else is kind of I mean, it can be delightful, yes,
but it's like, oh, this doesn't taste like ketchup, and
that's a lot of people's experiences, I think making it
at home, they're like, well, this is nice, but right.
I definitely think that in restaurants you are running a
risk if you don't offer also bottled ketchup, because people
will be angry that they're not getting what they what
they think of ketchup as um. But yeah, like I've
(39:27):
made it once and all I did was add like more,
I made it spici here and I liked it. But yeah,
if you're looking for hins like that sweet ketchup, you're
never gonna get it. Yeah, just buy it, just buy it.
That's why all the recipes, like we said, they started
disappearing out of the recipe books because people were like,
I want this thing and I can't do it, so
(39:48):
so even try al Ever, don't let that discourage you.
Should you want to try a different type of ketchup,
especially something like banana ketchup. Yeah, I know, I'm very
I really want to try that. Yeah, that's our catchup episode. Yes,
and that brings us to listeners. We really need to
(40:11):
record that one day because we all including Bill, and
we do like a hand motion look off in a direction. Yeah,
Dylan did really good muppet arms. Yeah, this one. It's
very exciting. Yeah, it is exciting, he wrote about our
cupcakes episode. I worked at a typical East Coast dinner
for a couple of years in college, and we always
had muffins, which I was like, why who would pick
(40:32):
a muffin? Well, I had an order for a muffin
and I found out that you can grill them on
the flat top, which makes any muffin amazing. The cooks
would slice it down the middle, spread on some butter,
and lay them down onto the hot flat top and
cover them for a couple of minutes. What you get
is a warmed up muffin that now has a crispy,
savory kind of French toast side to it. Listeners can
(40:55):
do it at home with a good hot pan on
snowtop two. Definitely elevates the muffin game aim and great
for the day olds you probably don't want to eat
by themselves. That sounds really good. I want to do
that right now. I gotta say I've appreciated everyone who's
written in about Team Muffin or Team Cupcakes. It's been excellent.
Christie wrote, just listened to your banana episode. I don't
(41:18):
know how true it is, but my husband, who has
worked on boats most of his life, once told me
that bananas were bad luck on ships because of the
ethylene gas they omit while ripening. When stored in large
amounts in small spaces, this does not make a great combo.
If the bananas are kept with other fruits or veggies,
the gas causes them to ripen too quickly. This is
also why you can put a bunch of unripe bananas
(41:40):
in a paper bag to help them ripen faster. True story. Also,
banana bunches like to house bugs, spiders, et cetera, which
are incredibly hard to get rid of on vessels. Fun
ish fact. We used to work on private yachts, and
when we got supplies, if it came in a cardboard
cardboard box, it had to be unloaded before coming on
board because roaches and other bugs like to lay eggs
(42:01):
in the corrugated cardboard. This maybe where the crabbers and
fisherman got the superstition of bananas are bad on boats. Yeah,
I could see that, absolutely. No, I certainly I don't
want any of those things. And um also thank you
Christie for my landlord wants. Um gave me a bit
(42:22):
of a slap on the wrist for keeping around too
many cardboard boxes. He said cockroaches like to lay eggs
on them, and I was kind of like, really, but
it seems that at least he didn't just make it
up as I suspected. I hope you're not listening, but
if you are, hello, Landlord. I did get rid of
(42:44):
the boxes. Yeah, we'll see you're doing such a good job.
I did. I absolutely did. Oh boy. Anyway, that brings
us to the end of this episode. But if you
would like to write them and think thanks to both
of them for writing you can. Our email is food
Stuff at how stuff works dot com, where also on
social media you can find us on Twitter and Facebook
(43:06):
at food Stuff h s W and on Instagram at
food Stuff. Thank you so much to our amazing producer,
Dylan Fagan, and to you for listening, and we hope
that lots more good things are coming your way
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Anney Reese
Lauren Vogelbaum
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