Every once in a while, I come across a person who still hasn't read Malcolm Gladwell's definitive article on ketchup. Well, you should read the article. You probably don't think ketchup is a very interesting subject, but you're wrong.
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Sunday Condiment Blogging
27 Jan 2008 03:24 pm
Comments (27)
It's been a long time since I've read the piece. As I recall, Gladwell never really explains if or how ketchup has a "bitter" flavor. Aside from that, sure, greatest essay ever.
Gotta finish reading it first.
Speaking of subjects that seem inherently boring but aren't, does anyone remember the New Yorker mag article on the Bic and Quattro men's razors? When I read the ketchup article when it came out, it reminded me of the razor article. Heck, maybe Gladwell wrote that one, too, I dunno.
Surely the bitterness comes from its general vegetableness/tomatoness. He says "all along ketchup had been salty and bitter."
That is indeed a good essay. It convinced me, who had conceived an ill-reasoned aversion to ketchup in childhood which continued on into adulthood, to give ketchup another try, and it was indeed delicious.
I read this article a few years back. Who would have thought ketchup would be so interesting? Also, this article is probably the only time you'll ever read the phrase "band of renegade ketchup manufacturers".
Thank you, that was indeed a wonderful article.If you want to look at pictures of condiment packages, and you know you do, here are a couple of links.
http://www.clearfour.com/condiment/
http://condiment.portablefolkband.com/packets.php
Ketchup may be more interesting than this blog.
RSH, you could always try posting comments on ketchup bottles . . .
It was a well-written piece, but despite my use of both ketchup and brown (Grey Poupon-style) mustards, I didn't find the subject matter terribly interesting, even by the time I was done.
Ketchup isn't particularly interesting as a subject, because what are you going to do with it, besides put it on hamburgers, hot dogs, and fries? Whereas mustard has dozens of culinary uses.
I'll tell you the parts that I learned something interesting from: (a) the first 3.5 paragraphs of section 1, about the rise of alternative mustards, if you will; (b) paragraphs 2-5 of section 2, about Moskowitz, Prego, and culinary anti-Platonism; and (c) the first paragraph of section 4, about how ketchup, by hitting all the bases, manages to be the exception to Moskowitz' theory.
The rest, which was most of the article, I could have cheerfully done without.
“Ketchup is ‘one of the greatest successes the sauce world has ever known,’ wrote Elizabeth Rozin in the Journal of Gastronomy (Summer 1988). In its brilliant red color, its rich flavor, and its marked salinity, Rozin theorizes, ketchup represents the “fulfillment, both real and symbolic, of the ancient and atavistic lust for blood,” magically achieved with the use of plant products alone. Rozin also draws an analogy to the Christian Mass and its fruity surrogate for the blood of Christ, but I forget how it goes. All I know is that I discovered a case of Del Monte in one of the celebrated kitches of Piemonte, in northern Italy, vying with tartufi and porcini for the chef’s affections. And last year in Paris, in a kitchen soon to recieve its second Michelin star, I watched the chef add a dollop of Heinz to his sauce of salmon’s blood, red wine, and verjus, a postmodernization of Escoffier’s sauce genovoise. Cervantes once wrote, “La mejor salsa del mundo es la hambre,” the best sauce in the world is the hunger. Cervantes had obviously never tasted ketchup.”
- Jeffrey Steingarten, “Playing Ketchup,” The Man Who Ate Everything, p. 93
"RSH, you could always try posting comments on ketchup bottles . . ."
Well, since that's evidently where you got your style from...
As for ketchup, I'm reminded of a scene in one of William Burroughs novels where A. J., the "Merchant of Sex", goes into a top-flight blue blood restaurant with a bunch of Bolivian Indians chewing coca leaves, and a purple-assed baboon on a leash. He's causing a riot, the connoisseurs are knotting hangman's ropes, and the head waiter is bearing down on the table, when A, J. looks up and bellows:
"Boy! Bring me some ketchup!"
Happy now?
I've never understood why ketchup even exists when there is chili sauce.
Ketchup is sweet and sour, not bitter. Two of the main ingredients (check your Heinz bottle) are vinegar and corn syrup. And there is a gourmet chunky version of ketchup. It's called salsa.
Ketchup sucks.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that Hitler liked ketchup so.....
Sean writes: "Actually, I'm pretty sure that Hitler liked ketchup so....."
Eek. And Dick Cheney doesn't use ketchup - he uses pus scraped off of the untreated wounds of Muslims trapped in secret CIA prisons.
I was just thinking about this article the other day; thanks for providing the link (though if I actually went to the trouble of opening my copy of "The Complete New Yorker", I could get at it anyway) .
I clicked through on this article, and enjoyed it very much. And I kept thinking along the way that this had a "New Yorker" feel to it that I liked.
It was only at the end that I realized that it was, indeed, a New Yorker article.
Kudos to the New Yorker.
p.s. I am NOT a New Yorker shill.
You might also want to check out Gladwell's performance
at TED : "What we can learn from spagetti sauce" :
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/20
Was this article the inspiration for that Ketchup song?
....adding, I always fundamentally disagree with everything Gladwell says. Unless Gladwell says he likes that Ketchup song.
Great read. One quibble...
Gladwell says before Grey Poupon there was only one kind of mustard sold but I'm pretty sure German mustard existed in the United States with local distribution for a long time. Maybe the national distributors didn't have anything but American yellow mustard but I can't believe all the European immigrants in the Midwest didn't duplicate their traditional mustard for sale on a regional basis.
Overall, a very interesting article. It's about an hour before lunch, and now I have to find something that I can eat with ketchup.
There are a few loose ends concering whether ketchup violated the "Moskowitz-variety-rules-rule" that Gladwell seemed to leave hanging to explain why ketchup is different than other foods:
1. The Moskovitz rule may only work for big-boy foods: The article mentions that most ketchup is consumed by children, and children are neophobic--they tend to stay loyal to a few tried-and-true tastes. Therefore, it stand to reason that it is an exception to Moskovitz' rule, and variety won't sell if the product is child-centric.
2. The Moskovitz rule may only work for high-amplitude variations: The article fails to mention the level of amplitude in the different spagetti sauces that Moskovitz tested. If the sauces were all different from each other but all had a high level of amplitude, then the different varieties would still have across the consumer strata. This is different than the ketchup situation, where the high-sellers had high amplitude and the low-sellers had low amplitude. This makes me wonder how Grey Poupon's amplitude compares to that of French's.
All of this is a long-winded way of saying that I really don't want to get to the work on my desk...
What type of ketchup would Marinetti have used? Sun-dried tomacco mixed with lighter fluid, I guess.
Ah yes, now I recall being kind of annoyed by that article when I read it in the magazine, too. Any author who glosses over the difference between French's and Gulden's with scarcely an aside hasn't thought very much about food, no matter how many words he pounds out on the subject.
Spicy brown mustard is only slightly more like yellow than dijon, and was ubiquitous decades before Grey Poupon got big. But it complicates Gladwell's story, so it disappears. It may seem an unimportant issue to get irritated about, but it's exactly what journalists do all the time in order to tell the stories that they prefer.
I would add that this fact probably undermines Gladwell's premise. Why? Because all American ketchup is and has been more or less like Heinz. Whereas, long before Grey Poupon changed the market, substantially different versions of mustard were available in every supermarket (except possibly in the South, where I understand yellow mustard to have been sine qua non). It demonstrates quite clearly that, common as the pairing is, mustard and ketchup aren't actually comparable.
Malcolm Gladwell's article is excellent, but why not get the whole ketchup story by reading my book-- "Pure Ketchup: The History of America’s National Condiment"? It is available in many libraries and of course it is for sale online.
Gladwell was correct about my academic training in Political Science, which I have indeed found helpful. All food is connected with politics -- particularly today. Pure Ketchup, for instance, does focus on the passage the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.
That said, I don't think the professors who taught me poli sci ever mentioned ketchup-- or popcorn-- or peanuts or soup or turkeys or tomatoes or even food in general. Perhaps it would have been more exciting -- and more useful-- had they done so...
Andrew F. Smith
www.andrewfsmith.com
Comments closed February 10, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
Speaking of Sundays, are you going to chip in on the "Waving Goodbye to Hegemony" NYT magazine piece?
Posted by otto | January 27, 2008 3:41 PM