An Ode to Ketchup

An Ode to Ketchup

My grandfather taught me a lot of things, and most of the things he taught me have stuck with me my whole life — like my love of ketchup. I can remember going on vacation with my grandparents and watching Grandpa smother fried eggs and hash brown potatoes in ketchup in restaurants from Michigan to Mississippi, from the Alleghenies of Pennsylvania to the grits and eggs in roadside diners in The Great Smoky Mountains. At every meal, no matter where we stopped or what food was served, you could bet it would be smothered in ketchup.

So I come by my love of ketchup honestly. I was born and raised on it. But as I grew up, something changed, and it wasn’t my love of ketchup, it was the ketchup I loved.

It seems in the industry’s greed for higher profits and cheaper ingredients,  the Holy Grail of ketchup, Heinz, decided it could mess around with my beloved sauce and start making it from canned tomato sauce instead of fresh, red, ripe tomatoes. And to make matters worse, and to save money, they used HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup) in place of real sugar.

I’m not going into great detail about the hazards of HFCS, but suffice it to say it’s got an extra molecule that doesn’t belong and one that causes the body to metabolize sugar like alcohol, that is, in the liver. Oh, you may doubt me, but you can look it up. HFCS is some nasty stuff — you can do some research and learn how it’s made.

I don’t know exactly when Heinz pulled the plug on real ketchup and started selling the red stuff they now call ketchup, but they couldn’t fool me. Before the current anti-HFCS craze, I used to drive several hundred miles and cross the border into Canada, for the sole purpose of getting real Heinz Ketchup made in Leamington, Ontario, Canada where they– are still hopefully–making ketchup with real sugar and real tomatoes.

You’ll probably think I’m making this up, but I’m not. One time, long ago,  (and my youngest son can verify this), I was stopped returning to the USA by U.S. customs who found several dozen bottles of Canadian Heinz Ketchup in my car. The female customs agent, undoubtedly anxious to find some reason to detain me — smuggling ketchup? — they finally gave up and let me back into the good, old U.S.A. with my precious cargo of 48 bottles of real Heinz Ketchup. But I will never forget the look she gave me.

Driving hours and hours to find real ketchup isn’t very practical, so I, like every other ketchup lover in the USA, gave into convenience and bought the so-called ketchup that Heinz was foisting upon the American public – American Heinz Ketchup — made from canned tomato concentrate and worse, lots of HFCS.

Heinz finally acquiesced to those ketchup aficionados like me who know their sauce by making “Heinz Organic Ketchup” made with “real sugar” as if there was anything else called sugar other than real sugar. But again, Heinz couldn’t fool me. Real Heinz is made with “red, ripe tomatoes” not tomato sauce tomato paste, or tomato concentrate made from red, ripe tomatoes. It’s made from red, ripe tomatoes, cooked down into a thick rich sauce. Something bad happens when you mash tomatoes, cook them, and then stick them in a can for heaven knows how long.

American grocery store shelves are festooned with red bottles purporting to be ketchup, but it only slightly resembles the real ketchup that my grandfather squirted on his fried eggs and hashbrowns (and almost everything else) all those years ago.

And I use the word “squirted” nostalgically, Back in those days, almost all restaurants and diners had those plastic ketchup things on the table – and mustard things too –  plastic bottles with pointed hollow tops – the hollow tip was great for squirting ketchup — and mustard – onto food in generous quantities. The ketchup in those plastic things was the real stuff. It was so real they used to leave it sitting on the table all the time, even overnight…no refrigeration required.

There was a ketchup factory in my little town – not Heinz – that made ketchup straight from tons of fresh, red, ripe tomatoes, grown by local farmers and hauled in by the truckload. Inside the factory, in huge metal kettles, they’d cook the tomatoes down into red gold … thick, rich, ketchup. I know because my grandfather and I visited the factory and took the tour.

In the early days of autumn the smell of ketchup cooking and leaves burning filled the air. It was a lovely smell, and now a beautiful memory.

Those were the days my friend.