Hey, I am Bruce Weinstein and this is the podcast Cooking with Bruce and Mark.

And I'm Mark Scarborough, and together with Bruce, my husband, we've written three seven cookbooks and I currently have a cold. So if you hear me sniffling, you'll know exactly what's going on. It hit me last night right after dinner. It's like my nose stopped up and I started sneezing uncontrollably. Well, anyway, a bad cold, uh, but otherwise I'm okay. So this is our podcast about food and cooking our. Passions. I don't know what our, our, the way we pay our mortgage. I don't know. What is it? Something like that. We have a one minute cooking tip, which is really not about cooking as you'll see, but kind of, and then we're gonna talk all about the ketchup. Mm-hmm. Something that you may not know it's history, where it comes from, even the weird way, the word formed ketchup. And we'll tell you what's making us happy in food this week. So let's get started.

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And I just wanna say, I'm gonna interrupt Bruce for a second before he says what he's ever, he's gonna say next is, uh, we're not talking about us. I mean, yes. Thank you for being here.

You are supporting us. Just we're listening. But I know,

but this is not a comment about support food and recipe content creators. This isn't necessarily about us. This is about what happens when you're on your phone.

Yeah. Don't scroll, stop scrolling. Like. Better and subscribe. The media landscape is getting more and more fragmented, and it's important to support the food and recipe creators that you follow, whose recipes you use, the people you admire, right? Because if you don't support them, they're gonna go away,

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it's really crucial as you're scrolling, as you're sitting, the air scrolling over your phone, and you come across your content just like it if you even like some of it. Just like it. Or if you really wanna go crazy, subscribe to their channels, Bruce. Yeah. I subscribe

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and you'll see more and you'll help support these people who are the new kind of, uh, wave of recipe creation. Mm-hmm. The content creators. Mm-hmm. So not really about cooking, but about helping people who in fact are trying to make cooking better. Alright. Before we get to the big part of this podcast, let us say that of course, you can support us by in fact, subscribing to this podcast and writing a review of this. Podcast and all those kind of things. We've already, uh, basically done that. So let's just get on to ketchup.

What is ketchup? It's obvious, isn't it? It comes in those little foil packets or plastic packets at McDonald's. Oh, it does. It does. I thought it came in bottles. It comes in bottles at home. It's always sitting on the tables and diners. You put it on everything from eggs to burgers to french fries. Wait,

what? You put it on what?

Scrambled eggs. Oh. I grew up eating ketchup on eggs. My grandfather put ketchup on everything and I learned from him everything, everything. Every,

your grandmother, who knows what happened back there in the ettl. Oh, oh, oh my God. Um, alright. Uh, so, uh, yeah, sure. No, not eggs. That's disgusting. Mm-hmm. It's good on eggs. No gross. But. Let's first say something about the name of this thing. Ketchup. Yeah, of course. You probably know ketchup. It can be spelled Kaupp. K-S-E-A-T-S-U-P. It's still pronounced ketchup, no matter which way you spell it.

Growing up, what my grandparents had and they refrigerator was. Catsup. That was the big divide, right? There was Heinz ketchup and Hunts catsup

there. That's exactly right. But mostly catsup, which is still pronounced ketchup was the term used for this sauce before 1900. By the mid 19 hundreds, 19 50, 19 60. It's becoming. Almost solely ketchup with a K, not catsup. There was some holdover as Bruces when we were kids, right? That was cat sup. But most of that has gone away and now we see some uh, gen Z entrepreneurs of people who are making various kinds of catsup spelling it. Yeah, cat sup. And I think they're trying to be throwback and old school anyway, no matter which way you spell it. It's pronounced ketchup. So I should say. Where this word comes from is really highly contested. Believe it or not, there are a lot of people who fight over this. So let me just start. I'm gonna start. Mm-hmm. With Miriam Webster, which is of course your friend, Miriam. Well, we start, no, my copy editor for our books always corrects me about anything and says, well, our friend Miriam says, and what she means by that is Miriam Webster defines word, when was Miriam alive, but. Hundreds of years ago. So, uh, it's Daniel Webster and Miriam, and anyway, it doesn't matter. It's now Miriam Webster. So the claim there is that it comes from a melee word, which is basically ketchup up, or I'm nce, I'm sure I'm brutalizing it. Ketchup and it means soy sauce or particularly savory sauce. And if you know anything about. Indonesian condiments. This word has stuck around.

Yeah. And because the Indonesian sauce, that is still called a ke cap, manis, and I know that's not the way you pronounce it. It's ketchup. Ketchup, manis mess doesn't resemble what we consider in the West ketchup at all. No, it's not a tomato base. It's not that sweet and vinegary thick tomato thing that I want. Oozing out of my hamburger bun and sitting on my french fries. Oh, done. It's a, my god, almost a sweet and thick soy sauce that catch

it. My ass. That was really too graphic for me. Oozing out. I, no, I just can't. If you put enough,

it oozes out. Uh,

you know, when I was a kid, uh, if we dared to put. Ketchup on a hamburger. My mother drew herself upright and said, I reared you better than that, because that was just considered so low class to put ketchup on a hamburger. I guess

us Yankee, New York liberals were just lower class.

You were lower class from her Southern Heights. Anyway, legendary food writer, Elizabeth David, and culinary historian Karen Hess, both claimed that the word catchup is actually from. Arabic from an Arabic word that means pickling in vinegar. Mm-hmm. And it shows up in French as Es, and in Spanish as esche. Well, it kind of

makes sense, right?

They claim that this is the derivation of the word. And when it was anglicized that E es first syllable was dropped because it was considered foreign sounding and you ended up with. Kaveh or kave, which have slowly morphed into what we now say is ketchup.

That kind of makes sense to me. I mean, 'cause every kind of ketchup that we're used to now, and we'll get to what kinds there are all have a vinegar base. Right. They all are some kind of ly preserved something. Right. Right. So that kind of makes sense. And

I, yeah. Also, it's just for the sake of completeness, Hey, there is a. Folk etymology, meaning it's not documented, you can't prove it, but there's a folk etymology out of Cantonese. That dialect of Chinese, because the word there used that is similar to ketchup means tomato sauce, and it's actually derived from two Chinese characters, foreign eggplant. It was thought that the tomato was considered a foreign. Eggplant and this word then kind of fused of these two characters, and then it came to be tomato sauce. But there's very little evidence that this is the actual derivation of word. Yeah. That

I, I, I agree. That's probably not really based in reality because there isn't anything in the Cantonese world that I know of, of. Course, there's a lot I don't know about, but I'm pretty familiar with Chinese condiments and I don't know of anything that is a tomato base in a condiment in China. Sweet potato base? Yes. And soy, but not tomato, tomato.

Okay. So that's where it comes from. Now, lemme tell you about how it first makes its way into print in English. It first appears it is word ketchup in the late 16 hundreds entities, not tomato base. Mm-hmm. It is mushroom based and the first derivations and types of ketchup that come into print that we can actually trace are mushroom sauces. One of the first published recipes is from Eliza Smith's 1727, the complete house wipe, and she makes there in the recipe a thin sauce of mushrooms. Anchovies and horseradish.

That actually sounds really good. It also sounds like the base of a lot of modern steak sauces, doesn't it? Well, it

is, and this is the thing that you should know. A one steak sauce and other steak sauces like that are probably much. Closer to the original notion of ketchup. Mm-hmm. Minus the sugar because A one sticks mostly sweet. It is sweet, right. And if you just listen to me, mushrooms, anchovies, and horseradish, there is absolutely nothing sweet in that. That is a powerful condiment. So it comes along basically as a really. Thick mushroom and fish reduction until 1812 when this guy James Meese, he's a US medical doctor and horticulturalist, back in the day when you could be both at the same time, he actually published a recipe for tomato-based ketchup. And I really wanted read you this recipe 'cause it cracks me up. So here was me's recipe in 1812. Okay? Already I'm gonna make

this so I'm gonna follow you.

Oh God. Please don't. Okay, so he mashes up a gallon. A gallon. I'm just telling you what it is. In the actual print. Mm-hmm. A gallon of chopped tomatoes. Yeah.

Got it. No problem.

And he adds a pound of salt to it.

Salty.

A pound to a gallon.

Puffy. I'm gonna be puffy.

Right. So he mixes a pound of salt into a gallon of mushed up tomatoes, and he lets that sit for three days.

It's not even gonna ferment this so much salt. It's gonna kill even the good bacteria. I don't know

exactly what he's doing here. I think he's pulling a lot of the juice out, right? He's

definitely getting all the moisture out.

Okay. Then you're supposed to divide that into courts and to. Each quart, you add a pound of anchovies. Mm-hmm. So a huge amount of anchovies.

Is he adding filets of the whole thing with the heads and guts? I think

it's filets, but I, I think so. Okay. Two ounces of mint shallots, and then,

oh, only two ounces. God forbid it be too many shallots.

Ounce of ground black pepper. That's a lot. That's a couple

tablespoons. That's

gonna be fiery. It's gonna be like Vietnamese fiery pepper food. Mm-hmm. Okay. So you boil all that for 30 minutes and then you add all these spices, mace, all spiced ginger, nutmeg, coriander, and kaile.

Oh, that's that red insect food coloring. Exactly. Except in

1812 when James Meese writes this, he means the insect illa. He put the whole insect in, which is the derivative of the red food coloring dog. Yep. So you put a couple of those dead insects in there to turn it red. Oh geez. They're dead. I guess so. So you pound it all together, you sve it through a jelly bag, you ba bottle it, you cork it, and Meese claims that it will last for seven years. What would

a pound

of salt, it might, I don't know, a pound of salt. It seems as if this is a botulism nightmare to me.

I don't think anything can grow in a pound of salt.

Yeah, maybe. Okay. So then we we're gonna come up into the late 18 hundreds. So you say, what happens to ketchup?

Okay. So then by the late 18 hundreds, this thin, runny, spiced tomato sauce that was salty and peppery and fishy, um, it, it. It's that way into the late 18 hundreds. We get to 1913 and now Webster's Dictionary says it is a table sauce.

That means it comes to the table, is not used in the kitchen.

Ah. So it's, no, it's not an ingredient, but it is now truly a condiment. Correct. Of tomatoes. Mushrooms, and. Walnuts. Yeah. I love that. Because walnuts, no

mushrooms have stuck around in this. Mm-hmm.

I Well, but mushrooms are so easily available, readily available. At that time they were free 'cause you go out and harvest them. So mushrooms were a great ingredient for big households, small households. And I love the idea of walnuts. 'cause walnuts, when you pound them and grind them, they give a thickness so they can thicken, they add an earthiness, they add a great flavor, and they add some fat. What they're gonna do though is they are going to add an ingredient that can turn rancid. So nothing is gonna last as long and it's

also gonna be grainy. Yep. There's no way. It's not gonna be grainy with walnuts in you.

No. 'cause they didn't have a neutral bullet.

No, they did not have a nutri bullet. But you notice that in all this discussion about ketchup. We have never mentioned sugar ketchup. As a sauce, mushroom or tomato baze was not sweetened until the early 20th century, and a huge divide happens right here. While across the world, it starts being sweetened. Many forms of ketchup, for example, today Australian ketchup is far runnier than us ketchup. Annie is far less sweet. It's more sour. So there, there's a divide that starts to develop between the thick. US condiment, Canadian condiment and other parts of the world where it's a thinner, more sour sauce. Oh, so

that fabulous 1980s, uh, advertising campaign for Heinz Ketchup, would they used anticipation, that song anticipation. Yes. Right. Where they couldn't get the ketchup outta the bottle. They can't run that ad in Australia.

Well, I guess

not.

So the initial industrial production, uh, of ketchup. Involved sodium benzoate, which is a pickling agent. You may know it if you ever pickle foods or ever read labels, but sodium benzoate is thought to have very adverse effects in humans. And in fact, the US Department of Agriculture will ban the use of sodium benzoate as a preservative in the early 19 hundreds. So now you gotta figure out how to make this thing so shelf stable.

Enter Henry Hines. Yeah. Right. Who's he would be very proud of his company and his children and his great-great-great-great grandchildren. Yeah, because they are still making ketchup after experimenting with vinegar and sugar ratios that would allow his ketchup to become shelf

stable. And he is part of the wave of the thickeners, the people who start to add pectin from jelly making and preserve making. To make it thicker and thicker. And also we should say that pectin also has a preserving function, as we know from cold, cold canning. Yeah. It has a preserving function.

Yeah. But today we kind of, most ketchup makers have gone away from the pectin and the way their ketchup is thickened, it was just by using a blend of tomato concentrates, they often start with tomato paste or even the double tomato paste, which is twice as thick. And yes, you have your vinegar, you have your high fructose corn syrup or corn syrup, some. Only use sugar. And I have found even finds, there are some, has a sugar only ketchup that's out there. Uh, they have spices, onion powder, and preservatives. And of course they cook it so it reduces even more and it concentrates. And then of course they process it for shelf stability. And it can last in your pantry couple years if you get a fresh bottle off the shelf in the supermarket.

And you'll notice what Bruce just said there. There's no pectin in that mix. Yep. And here's the deal. Once more and more sugar was added, and then once it flipped over to the high fructose corn syrup and corn syrup additions in some types of ketchup, you didn't need the pectin for thickness anymore. The sugar gave it mm-hmm. To it. In the same way that like you can make blackberry preserves without adding pet. Thin and by just boiling it out in the sugar and the natural pectin in the blackberries makes it thicker. Same idea. And the corn syrup is particularly, makes it super thick as it boils down. It does. And that's part of the removal of pectin from this process.

And ketchup has gotten to a point where it is kind of fetishized. I mean, there are so many artisanal ketchups out there. Oh my God.

And some people, like my sister-in-law will not eat anything but Heinz ketchup. I know. She won't even. Touch any other ketchup except Heinz ketchup.

I know. I'm surprised she doesn't bring a bottle with her. She does.

She does. I've seen her bring bottles out to restaurants.

Remember that Seinfeld episode where they try and bring their own maple syrup and they're not allowed to bring it in? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can't bring outside condiments. Well, so speaking of maple syrup, maple syrup is at a point where it's grated. Right? You know what's in it. Ketchup is the same way. So you can get a GR of ketchup called Fancy in the us. In the us, in the us. 'cause the USDA is given that grade, and if you see that word, fancy. On ketchup. It doesn't mean that it's fancy. It means that there is a higher concentration of tomato to everything else. Yeah. Which is kind of nice. I

think. I didn't, I know, I didn't know that until I did the research for this podcast episode because I've seen fancy ketchup on bottles and I didn't know that was a, that was a. Actual governmental, I didn't know. Degrade of ketchup. So that's basically how what we now know as ketchup happens. But you should know that there are lots of ketchup. Mm-hmm. Remember where this came from? Mushroom sauces. Yeah. With anchovies. So lots of ketchups. And I just wanted to, um, maybe mention a few, and these occur actually in our book mm-hmm. Called Canning. And I thought I'd let Bruce talk about them for a minute. So talk for a minute about curried ketchup.

Yeah. So Curried ketchup is. Is something that you find very common in Germany. Um, they eat curried ketchup with, uh, sausages and avers. You can, you can easily just mix a little curry powder into standard ketchup, but we give you a recipe for making a curried ketchup, uh, from scratch, which is, you know, you saute some onions and garlic and curry powder and paprika, and you have dried mustard and cloves and all those spices that go into curries. And of course, there's a canned tomato puree instead of sugar, we use honey, which is really nice. A little vinegar, some wor here, you boil that thickens and it's really nice and it's nice to have it on sausages or on french fries. It's a nice change from your standard ketchup. Okay,

let me talk to you. Bruce is getting all excited about the recipe as the chef always is. So lemme talk to you about banana catchup because that is actually in a recipe in the book and we've actually made that in demos promoting the book. Yeah. So what is Banana cast?

Well, it's a Filipino condiment and in the Philippines. There's a ketchup that's made from bananas, and you know, in the tropics you get bananas that are so much more flavorable and sweeter than most of the bananas we can get here in North America. But still, and nonetheless, I tried to create a banana ketchup that was close to the bottles of Filipino banana ketchup that I have eaten. And again, it starts by sauteing onions. And here you get red chilies. So it's a spicy thing and you have ginger and garlic and turmeric and all spicy. It's a sweet, spicy sauce. Island, you know, all those island kind of spices and then very, very ripe bananas. 'cause you want that super intense banana flavor. That's, you know, bananas have to be one step away from fermenting. Yeah. Then have perfect. Yeah. To be as, as I always

say, these bananas are liquid. Yeah. They have to be, become just basically kind liquid. So. Okay. That's, uh, banana ketchup. Curry ketchup. Now we also have a recipe for mushroom ketchup. So what's

that? So this one is really, dates back, as you said, centuries and I try to, uh. To recreate what that original ketchup might've been like using. And so it's very thin. This is a much thinner, almost like a steak sauce, ketchup. And I put the, the mushrooms just plain old button mushrooms in a food processor. And really you want to chop them really fine and you put them into a pan, you add salt. Not a pound of salt, but for a pound of mushroom, it's just a tablespoon of salt. And you let that sit. You don't put it on a flame, you just put the cover on the pan and set it aside. At room temperature, 24 hours, what's gonna happen is all that moisture is going to leach out, and it's going to become something unappealing at that moment, but it's gonna change because you're gonna add to that. Malt vinegar and shallots and garlic and brown sugar and thyme, and all spice and cloves, and a little Worcester shear. And you're going to cook that until it is just fragrant and deep and complex. Thicken it with a little corn starch, and you will have something that's not quite the old mushroom ketchup. Not quite a steak sauce, but something that is better than both combined.

So we also have in the book various fruit ketchups because there's no reason if this is, uh, to use the 19th century word, a table sauce. This table sauce. You can have plum ketchup, you can have blueberry Chipotle, ketchup. We have all of those in the book. Yeah, right. We have all those in the book. And really, honestly, all these things are ketchups. And in fact, as I already said to you, steak sauce can be considered a ketchup. Mm-hmm. And we have a recipe for our mates. Steak sauce. What does it involve?

Well, I tried to model this one on the classic A one, which means we've gotta put in raisins, we've gotta put in oranges, 'cause those are definitely in there. It is a sweet and sour balance of raisins dates, uh, shallots, garlic chilies, molasses or black treacle if you could find it, which is a UK condiment that is like molasses but thicker and more intense

with, better with bite trickle. Yeah,

there is some tomato paste and vinegar, and here's the key, the orange zest and tamarind concentrate. For that sour and fruity edge.

Right, right, right. And it gets that very fruity stuff from the tamarind concentrate and that steak sauce like that. That really classic steak sauce is in fact, in the tradition of what ketchup is. Yep. Although most of us think of ketchup as the red stuff that comes out of a bottle. So that's our complete rundown of ketchup. Anything else you wanna say about it?

Yes. I'm gonna say try some ketchup. Un scrambled eggs. Oh, do not put it on fried eggs. That's disgusting. You don't wanna mix ketchup into the yo.

Yeah. Oh, there is such a. Fine distinction between fried eggs and scrambled eggs and ketchup. But yeah. Right. Ketchup

omelet is amazing. Oh

my God. So when I met Bruce, he also liked something that is so New York to me. It makes me barf. And that is a jelly omelet. Oh yeah. Uh, that's disgusting. Discu tell Jelly down the middle of an omelet

Concord grape jelly in the middle of your omelet. Oh

my

gosh. My dad used to make that for me. All right,

well I'm glad you have a good memory about jelly. Disgusting omelets. That's lovely. Um, okay, that's all about that. Just to be shamelessly self-promotional, our new book is called Cold Kenny and includes all of these recipes and. 400 and, I don't know, twin 15 more recipes for these kind of things. Condiments, preserves all in tiny, small batches without the use of any pressure or steam canner around. So check out cold canning. Okay. As is traditional, the last segment of this podcast, what's making us happy in food This week,

I'm gonna tie mine back to our one minute cooking tip, and I'm gonna give a shout out to a food content creator, um, in social media. Where their stuff always makes me happy. And that is Chinese food demystified. They have a YouTube channel, they have a newsletter. Um, they have a Substack. They, they're great and it's a couple, um, she's Chinese and he's Western, but he speaks fluent. Many languages in Chinese and others, and they live in Asia and their recipes are amazing. And my favorite one that you're probably going to get in the next few days, mark, is their Siwan beer, braised duck. And he goes and step by step how to make it. And I love their stuff.

I do too. And I'm gonna speak about another Sichuan dish, which we had for dinner last night, which was. Bruce makes this, uh, fish dish, which is a soup, right? Mm-hmm. A little bit of a thickened soup with preserved soured, mustard tubers. Mm-hmm. And we use, he uses, I don't do anything. He uses ocean perch for it. What else goes in there? Uh,

fermented, urging to chilies.

And, uh, lots of ginger and, uh, Chuan peppercorn oil. Mm-hmm. Over the top of it is really hot and numbing. It's a really tasty soup. In New England, we have switched to fall, believe it or not, where we live. It's cold. It's gotten cold. It was in the forties this morning, so soup is on the table. And last night we had an incredibly. Sour Delicious fish soup that Bruce made, again, from one of the Chinese content creators that he follows. Chinese food demystified. There you go. He got it from there. Okay, that's the podcast for this week. Thanks for being part of this journey with us. Uh, thanks for always making time for. In your schedule

and while you're out there scrolling and liking everything, scroll around TikTok and find our feed cooking with Bruce and Mark. We're putting up tons of videos on our TikTok channel, cooking with Bruce and Mark, and unlike a lot of other things which you may not know are AI and they're not even real. Ours is real, and it'll always be real. No AI here on cooking with Bruce and Mark.