Ketchup

[slumkeyhatch]

My kids love ketchup and I do too, specially on fries. We usually buy Heinz before but now I buy the ones being sold in Costco

[GeneChing]

Speaking of Heinz...

6 years of bowel distress caused by a ketchup packet
By Mike Moffitt, SFGATE Published 1:40 pm, Wednesday, January 3, 2018


Photo: Heinz A Heinz ketchup packet, apparently swallowed unwittingly by a 35-year-old woman, led to six years of painful symptoms that mimicked Crohn's disease.

For six years, a British woman suffered bouts of severe pain in her abdomen accompanied by uncomfortable bloating. The attacks could last as long as three days.
Doctors diagnosed her with Crohn's disease, a serious inflammatory bowel disorder that can cause both symptoms, but the treatments they prescribed had no result.
The case, detailed in the British Medical Journal, proved to be a head scratcher. Finally physicians decided to operate on the 41-year-old woman.
During keyhole surgery, a team at the Heatherwood and Wexham Park hospital in Slough, U.K., made a startling discovery. Two pieces of a 6-year-old packet of Heinz ketchup had pierced the woman's intestinal wall, causing inflammation around the wound. Or, as they put it in their report: The "laparoscopy revealed an inflammatory mass in the terminal ileum, exposing two pieces of plastic bearing the word 'Heinz'."
After the plastic shards were removed, the patient's symptoms began easing immediately and had completely disappeared after five months.
Previously Crohn's disease was diagnosed in a patient who swallowed a toothpick, but this is believed to be the first case in which plastic packing was found to be the cause of Crohn's-like symptoms.
According to the report in the British Medical Journal, the woman had no memory of swallowing the packet.

[wolfen]

In case y'all haven't met her. I think she can make a positive contribution to this ketchup thread.



Showry - 쇼리 Crazy girl - I want more

[David Jamieson]

Wait...you get called out for stating a well known historic fact?

Ketchup was a Chinese invention.
So was pasta (watch the Italians get worked up on this one! lol )
gunpowder
typesetting
and a great many other still used items in the here and now.

The thing that blew me away the most is that the Chinese mastered Bronze smelting and work some 700 years before Europeans did.
I get it that they hid the ways and means of silk production for centuries, but Bronze? That's impressive trade secret protection!

[GeneChing]

Wait...you get called out for stating a well known historic fact?

I get called out all the time on the most absurd things. More so lately. It's okay. Being a publisher, it's to be expected.

That being said, I'm not sure that this is such a well-known historic fact. Maybe it is in Canada, but here in the good ol' USA, it's thought of as ALL AMERICAN, like hamburger and french fries.

[GeneChing]

Ketchup
Bubble-Tea-Boba

[GeneChing]

The surprising Asianness of ketchup

Jocelyn Tsai / Special to The Chronicle

RACHEL KHONG
Oct. 18, 2022

What comes to mind when you think of ketchup? Does the word conjure burgers and hot dogs and fries — maybe a Fourth of July barbecue, fireworks exploding festively overhead? The classic glass Heinz bottle, whose bottom requires heavy smacking? That trusty, goopy red condiment that might enliven an otherwise bland and soggy onion ring?

Allow me to stop you right there. Because, for as American as it seems, ketchup, I’d argue, is a very Asian ingredient. It has a place of honor in my family’s Asian American household. Hundreds of years ago, ketchup actually may have originated in Asia, too.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “ketchup” comes from either Chinese or Malay. In the Chinese dialect Hokkien, “kê-tsiap” translates to a sauce made of fermented fish or shellfish. In Malay, “kecap” means “soy sauce,” and used to mean other fermented, savory sauces. The first time the word “ketchup” was used in English was in the 17th century, when British visitors to Southeast Asia were introduced to the sauce — which very possibly made its way from Vietnam.

In other words, what was originally called ketchup was most likely an ancestor of fish sauce. Early ketchups were made from a variety of ingredients — mushrooms, oysters, anchovies (the list goes on and on). Ketchup wasn’t synonymous with tomato ketchup. (In the Philippines, banana ketchup remains a popular condiment.)

It was Heinz that introduced ketchup as “catsup” in 1876, bringing tomato ketchup into preeminence and making the sauce thicker in viscosity. In addition to tomatoes, classic tomato ketchup includes onion, garlic and vinegar, and unnamed “spices,” including allspice, cumin and cloves. Fun fact: There is mustard in ketchup! There is also raisin juice concentrate. Global capitalism may have brought Heinz to the fore in the 1900s, and ultimately to fridges throughout America, but the fact of the matter is that ketchup would not exist without its Southeast Asian ancestors.

My family is Chinese Malaysian. Even without awareness of ketchup’s Southeast Asian history, I have felt, all my life, a particular affinity for ketchup. Ketchup was always one of our family’s preferred American condiments — easy to adore.

Whenever my mother cooked a steak for the family — one steak, to be shared among us all — it was served with ketchup. In fact, most proteins — fried chicken, chicken nuggets — were improved by ketchup. For salads, my mother approximated Thousand Island dressing by mixing together mayonnaise and ketchup. And, of course, cocktail sauce, made from ketchup, lemon and horseradish, regularly appeared at potluck parties, accompanied by a platter of cold shrimp. I could take or leave the shrimp. To me, it was cocktail sauce that was the star.

It makes sense: Malaysian food is all about the balance of sour, salty and sweet, and ketchup is all of those flavors in one perfectly proportioned condiment. Where in America ketchup is often about bringing intrigue and acidity to an overly heavy food (see: the aforementioned burgers, hot dogs and fries), across Asia, cooks use it as an ingredient.

You’ll sometimes find ketchup in Malaysian dishes like chili crab, or in noodle dishes like mee goreng or mee bandung or mee rebus. In Sichuan cooking, sweet-and-sour sauce incorporates ketchup (delicious on crispy fried fish). One Chinese dish I grew up with was tomato-egg, a simple, homey dish of scrambled eggs with chunks of tomato, seasoned with sugar and Shaoxing wine. Some cooks put ketchup in it for more of that sour-sweet, tomato-y flavor. Chinese beef tomato is another stir-fry that incorporates ketchup.

On occasion I squeeze ketchup into my fried rice the way some cooks do in Thailand or Taiwan. In Japan, ketchup takes the spotlight in ketchup spaghetti, and in “yum yum sauce” made with mayonnaise and ketchup and paprika. The Japanese dish omurice, omelet-swaddled fried rice, is not complete without a zigzag of ketchup. A friend’s mother puts ketchup into dal for sweetness. (Heinz doesn’t dominate in India. Instead, Maggi and Kissan sell India’s most popular ketchups.)

As an adult, I no longer eat steaks with ketchup. At some point, I learned that you weren’t “supposed” to. Doing so was a laughable offense — something a child, or a person with an unsophisticated palate, like Donald Trump, might choose. But now I’m realizing that, for my immigrant family learning American dietary customs, the addition of ketchup just made sense. A steak was a boring slab of meat, lacking the brightness, acidity and sweetness of the cuisine of our homeland. A squirt of seemingly all-American ketchup brought us closer to home.

Designed by Steven Boyle.

Rachel Khong is the author of the novel “Goodbye, Vitamin.” Email: food@sfchronicle.com

We knew this already but it bears repeating...

[GeneChing]

After tracking down the 'ketchup boat guy,' Heinz is ready to give him a new boat
By Zoe Sottile, CNN

Updated 3:06 AM ET, Sat March 4, 2023

In this photo provided by Colombia's Navy press office, castaway Elvis Francois is attended by Colombian Navy members after he was rescued near the department of La Guajira, in the extreme north of Colombia, Jan. 16, 2023. Heinz has said that they will gift Francois, who says he survived off only ketchup and seasonings for over 3 weeks, a new boat to celebrate his safe return.

(CNN)After enlisting the public's help to find Elvis Francois, a sailor who survived weeks lost at sea off of ketchup and seasonings, ketchup giant Heinz has finally tracked him down -- and plans to gift him a new boat.

On February 14, the company published a call for help on social media, saying they were struggling to get in touch with Francois.
The Dominica-born sailor made headlines after he spent 24 days adrift in the Caribbean Sea in January. After being rescued by the Colombian navy, Francois, 47, told officials that he had survived off of a bottle of ketchup, garlic powder, and Maggi stock cubes, which he mixed with water.
Heinz told CNN on Monday that they found Francois with the help of local reporters in Dominica working for the publication EmoNews. The company had previously said that they hoped to gift him "a new, state-of-the-art boat" to celebrate his safe return.
"We were able to connect with him and discuss the best way help support him and his family," a Heinz representative told CNN. "We (Heinz) and Elvis are currently working out the logistical details of gifting him his new boat."
The company emphasized the central role social media played in helping locate the sailor.
"Anyone who shared, liked or commented on the brand's post helped broaden the reach and played an important part in finding Elvis," said Heinz.
Francois was repairing his boat off the island of Saint Martin in December when his boat was pulled out to sea. He told Colombian authorities that he lacked the navigational knowledge to return to shore and spent 24 days lost at sea. He was rescued after a plane spotted his sailboat with "help" engraved into the hull, according to Colombian authorities.

Good story.

[mickey]

Greetings,

Heinz Ketchup sucks bolonkas.

The better ketchup was the one made by Del Monte. It is really second to none. The only problem is its availability and that on some of their bottles, they no longer use the word "catsup".


mickey