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I'm a ketchup fiend. When I was a little kid, I was famous for squirting my plastic bottle of Heinz on everything, from spaghetti to vanilla ice cream.
Haven't we done enough to the poor tomato? We've turned the voluptuous fruit into a pale imitation of itself: the average supermarket tomato, turned red with ethylene, tastes like, well, nothing.
As preparation for your fourth of July barbecue, watch this video about how to cook a hot dog.
Toonish Lite
The Warner Brothers cartoon RPG.
So maybe there is actually something to those ketchup routines on Prairie Home Companion?
Name one fluid that wasn't sold in the 1830's as medicine, and I'll bet it stands out if only because it has medicinal properties.
It wasn't too many years before then that tomatoes were considered poisonous to humans. And only 160 years later when ketchup was classified as a vegetable on school lunch menus. Ah, ketchup!
That really does not surprise me too much...it is a preserved food that is full of carotenoids - which people might have been in desperate need of in times past.
Clapping
In that time period, "ketchup" didn't necessarily mean tomato ketchup. There were recipes for ketchups based on lemons, mushrooms, anchovies and even walnuts.
"Ketchup" is thought to derive from the Indonesian kecap ican, a salted, fermented fish and soy sauce.
There's a good discussion of ketchup in Mark Kurlansky's wonderful book Salt, a World History along with a recipe for "love-apple"(tomato) ketchup from the early 19th century.