I love cows, as I was recently reminded when I made my annual visit to a steak restaurant in Portugal called Wolf. I hardly ever go to steak restaurants – you could call it a rare occurrence – but Wolf reconnects me with my inner beast. Every time I do go it brings back memories of a restaurant awards ceremony I attended several years ago when I was chastised by a foodie fascist for putting tomato ketchup on an Argentinian rump.
The Argentinian wasn’t too pleased either.
“The steak should speak for itself,” the foodie proclaimed with the kind of pomposity that can really only be cured by a fork in the thigh. I replied that if the steak could speak for itself, it wouldn’t be a steak, it would still be a cow.
A bigger issue that the foodies should be concerning themselves with is the proliferation of ‘red sauces’ that masquerade as ketchup but taste like nothing of the kind. Being red and sauce-like is not enough, any more than being orange and pointy makes you a carrot.
The archetype, of course, is Heinz Tomato Ketchup. I know, I’ve just broken the first rule of journalism: never name your sauces. But let’s be honest about this, it is the king of ketchups. Others have tried to clone it but none have succeeded, which is surprising in this day and age. Yes yes, secret recipe and all that, but they print the ingredients on the label. Surely all you need is an AI machine and one of those people with a special tongue (a supertaster I believe they’re called) and Bob’s your uncle. Just keep tweaking the combinations until you get an exact match.
Speaking of Bob, ketchup always reminds me of Bob Holness, who used the phrase ‘playing ketchup’ frequently as presenter of Blockbusters. Some people have spread the rumour that he was actually saying ‘playing catchup’, but then there are a lot of false rumours surrounding Bob, such as the one that he played the sax solo on Baker Street by Gerry Rafferty.
Everyone knows that was Dion Dublin.
The catchup rumour is not actually as far-fetched as it sounds because that was, in fact, the way the word ketchup was spelt when it came into the English language from Malaya or thereabouts in the late 17th century, as a fishy sauce, more like fish sauce. Then, for some inexplicable reason, the name morphed into catsup, a word that is still used in the USA, even though it’s silly. Cats have never had anything to do with it, neither as ingredient nor consumer.
Catsup could be made using just about any ingredient that could be pulverised and put in a jar: mushrooms, oysters, muscles, walnuts, cucumbers, foodies… and, of course, tomatoes. In classic Darwinian style, tomato catsup emerged as the survivor and earned the right to be called ketchup.
And until the cows start speaking for themselves and advise me otherwise, I will continue to apply it to my Argentinian rump.
