Can we quit talking about nothing but the weather? Granted, the weather has been pretty, shall we call it, remarkable–and we have remarked upon it at length. The sledding hill in back of the Y got a work-out, as did the various fleets of snow-removal and salt-spreader trucks. Some of the remarks were NOT something that one is likely to see in a family publication.
Weatherpersons on the miscellaneous communications channels went all-in with predictions, explanations, maps, charts, warnings, pictures. Commiserations were directed to virtually anyone who had to be out in the storm activity. The weather systems now are being given names, like the hurricanes always used to be (and still are…but not the same names as the on-land storm stuff…do you suppose we’ll ever run out of names? Maybe we can shift over to nicknames or things of that sort. Hurricane “Cutie-Pie” or “Rinky-Dink” as causes of devastation would be kind of hard to compute, but Hurricane “Betsy” was no sweetheart either, especially since there were four of them– 1954, 1956, 1961 & 1965–maybe they already ran out of names back then). Nowadays we are all trying to be more “inclusive”, choosing both male and female names, as well as some sort of uni-sex monikers. We’ve come pretty close to this lately; perhaps someone is using one of those “baby-name” books that are out there beckoning to expectant parents (and causing family fights). At some point, all weather events may just be divided into families–hurricane, blizzard, tornado, etc,–and given proper names like people.
Imagine having your beachfront home wiped out by Cyclone (Cy) Boreas Gale III, or his naughty daughter, Tempest Storm; don’t mess with the Afflatus Brothers either, not in an elevator, anyhow.
As I was saying, let’s talk about something besides the weather. How about food?
How about ketchup?
The AB-J had a short piece on the origins of ketchup the other day, tracing the ubiquitous condiment all the way back to China. It appears to have begun as a sort of pickling brine used to preserve fish–spicy, but no tomatoes yet. Heck, nobody had tomatoes but the Native Americans from pretty far south of here–no spaghetti sauce or pizza for Italians, no ketchup for a burger anywhere, not until somewhere in the 1700’s did tomatoes make an appearance. Before that, it had moved to being soy-based–nothing we’d recognize today. British and Dutch sailors, out on the edges of the Empire ran across a pickled fish sauce called ke-tsiap which had migrated from VietNam to China (or maybe the other way around) and they brought samples and a taste for this condiment back to their home countries –heavy on mushrooms and beer and spices…no tomatoes yet. Then British settlers crossed the Atlantic and brought their tastes with them. Still no tomatoes, just mushrooms. Anyway, tomatoes were called “love-apples” and thought by some to be poisonous. The first published recipe for ketchup (or catsup) called it “love-apple sauce”, which, presumably, persuaded folks that the poisonous tomatoes had been rendered innocuous by being cooked and doused with sugar and vinegar. Once upon a time there was a story, probably apocryphal, wherein a gentleman was arrested for attempting to commit suicide on the steps of some government building, by eating a basket of ripe tomatoes, right there, in front of God and everybody. So…he did not die and in 1869 Henry J. Heinz marketed the first bottle of what we might recognize as ketchup. And, as they say, “the rest is history.” Current ingredients labels may list tomato, sugar, vinegar, onion, allspice, coriander, cloves, cumin, garlic, but at various times egg whites, mushrooms, oysters, grapes, mussels, walnuts and anchovies might have been included. Squeeze packets were invented in 1968. Heinz even tried a multi-colored–not just red–product at one time but, you’ll notice, it’s gone now. Squirting your red hot with green sauce just did not cut it. The famous sauce has even made it into pop literature, namely a poem by the comedic poet, Ogden Nash. It goes like this:
“The trouble with the ketchup bottle… First none’ll come,
And then, a lot’ll.” Ain’t that the truth.
Next time maybe we’ll do a treatise on cake. I have a new cookbook from the PCDL here that looks pretty good; I may be forced to actually buy one.
