June 22, 2017 • 53 mins
Little-known fact: Ketchup, possibly the most all-American of condiments, evolved from fermented fish sauce people in Southeast Asia have been making for more than a thousand years.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
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Live touring home on the web, and we hope to
see everyone out there. Welcome to Stuff you should Know
from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to
(00:49):
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant,
there's guest producer. No, there's this stuff you should know.
I hate ketchup? Do you really? Yeah? Really? Yeah? Do
you like tomato sauce like Capasta? Sure? Love it? Do
you like tomato soup? D don't love it? I'll I'll
(01:14):
choke it down though. So I'm starting to see a
spectrum emerge here. Oh yeah, I don't. I don't go
for raw tomato much. Well, I love cooked pasta sauce. Yeah,
but I'm a mayonnaise guy at heart. So we're talking condiments.
You know. One thing about the the Derrito effect that
it kind of ruined me a little bit on food.
(01:35):
Like I'll be like, oh, this is a good tomato,
and then some part of my brains like, yeah, well
it's not in nineteen forties tomato. You don't know what
a good tomato is. What do you mean, like like
a Jersey tomato versus h you know, just some other
stupid tomato. No, supposedly, like just the agricultural production in
(01:57):
the US is so homogenized now that like we've lost
all these great heirloom varieties of especially tomato, and the
stuff that that most people get that are tomatoes are
just no, they're no good compared to how they used
to be. Oh, you hit up a farmer's market, sure,
but even still grow that junk yourself right there, you go,
(02:18):
or build the time machine, take the way back machine,
and get some tomato. We got that our disposal. What's
your what's your problem? I'm just cheap. I don't like
to spend it on the Yeah, well that's a funny
chuck that you like mayonnaise, because did you know? Did
you know before this I should say that the number
one condiment for sales wise in the United States is mayonnaise.
(02:41):
I did not know that. And when I saw that,
that surprised me a and it surprised me b that
it was that much more than Ketchup. I figured Ketchup
would be far and away the winter because I always
feel like the ultimate weirdo for not liking ketchup. So
what is it about Ketchup? You know, all the taste? Okay,
(03:03):
that's a pretty good reason not to like. I'm not
wild about vinegar based things. Oh. I do like balsamic vinegar,
but a lot of the other vinegars I'm not crazy about.
That's one of the reasons I don't like pickled things, right,
But so vinegar based things, Um, it's really sweet. Um.
Then I don't love sweet condiments. Um. Have you ever
(03:27):
had curry? Catchup? No? I don't. I don't need to
catch up. Oh I see. Uh. And then the when
I was a kid, I can't lie. It probably gross
me out a little bit because yeah, that was Oh
my god, Oh that's disturbing. Um, the blood thing, you know,
(03:52):
I probably thought, you know, it grossed me out because
we would use it as blood for play acting in things.
So yeah, just not into Those are some solid reasons
to not like catch up. Plus, I don't know if
people would probably argue that catchupimanes are great together, but um,
once you're on the Mayo train, to mix up another
(04:12):
condiment with it just doesn't make sense to me. I
I don't. I don't discriminate all. I like most, if
not all, condiments. So like catch up, mayo and mustard
on a burger is good? Do you? Yes? I can't.
It's not like I can't eat it without it, like
I've actually found, Um, I can eat burgers without catchup
(04:33):
now I'm a grown up. But I do like a
little bit of catchup on there, a little bit of
mustard and then yes, definitely mayo. Well, Emily loves catch
up so much that she calls French fries a catchup
delivery system that makes sense their vehicle for it. Tell
her to try curry catchup, it'll knock her socks off.
(04:54):
I totally will. Um. Yeah, but you don't like catch up,
so you wouldn' like this. But if she likes ketchup,
even if she doesn't like curry, she may still like
curry ketchup. Well, then she's gonna love curry ketch up.
So mayonnaise is the number one condiment in the United States.
(05:14):
It's a big surprise, which must mean catch up is
number two. Yeah, which, by the way, I had mentioned
how much more. I think it was about two billion
dollars to eight hundred thousand, eight hundred million dollars, which
is that's more than double. That kind of surprised me. Yeah,
it is very surprising. What's even more surprising is I
was being facetious because ketchup isn't even the number two
(05:35):
condiments in the United States. That's right. It's also had
a big surge in the like eighties and nineties. That's
because people like to say salsa. Catch up is number three, right,
at least it's got mustard beat. For Pete's sake, What
is this the you you know yet of American households
(05:56):
have a bottle of ketchup in there? Well, it's his kitchens.
But will get to the fridge non fridge thing later. So, yes,
everybody loves ketchup. Especially in America because it's obviously an
American invention. Everybody knows that John Wayne's grandfather inventing ketchup
while he was sailing his forward truck down the Mississippi River,
(06:16):
and one day a magical bottle Budweiser came and whispered
the recipians here, and they commemorated the event by tuning
off fireworks. I love it, and that's how ketchup was born.
Everybody knows that fireworks right pretty neat. No, that's not true.
Although I take a little bit of issue with this
(06:37):
because ketchup was first created in Asia and China, and
about I should say, I saw they think maybe the
Chinese got it from the Vietnamese. Yeah, I saw that too. Um.
But as you will see, these recipes that were originally
for preserving fish, it's hey, they didn't have tomatoes at all.
(07:00):
Came in America much later. But it's so not like
ketchup to me, it's you can't even trace it back
and say like, yep, that's ketchup. That's the point. And
even linking these things, because you can link them like
it's it. That's the fascinating thing to me about it.
It's like American ketchup. What we think of his ketch
up here in the States, like hinz fifty seven stuff, right,
(07:22):
is it's a species that evolved, not hine fifty seven sauce,
but Hinz ketchup. What everybody thinks of his ketchup. Right,
It's a species that evolved from an ancestor. That that is,
it can directly trace its lineage right back to this
ketchup in in Asia, so much so that the word
(07:42):
ketchup is an anglicization of either a melee word that
was borrowed from the Cantonese or a hokey in South
China Fujian province word. Either way, it was something like
catch you, and it meant a fermented fish paste. It's
(08:04):
like when when you go to the store today and
you buy fish sauce. That's that's that was, that's the
progenitor of ketchup. That's where ketchup came from. Yeah, I mean,
I guess that makes sense. It's just to me, it's
changed so much. It's almost like, Uh, you should just
draw a line, and I guess that line would be
pre tomato and post tomato. I think, yeah, I think
(08:25):
that's pretty fair to say, yeah, pre tomato and post tomato,
you can. You can definitely draw a line because if
you look at Hinz Ketchup bottles, it says clearly tomato Ketchup.
And there's this really great I think it was a
Fast Code design article by a guy named John Brownlee
who points out, like, why would they even bother putting
tomato on the label. Of course it's tomato ketchup, you idiot.
(08:49):
And the reason is because that's a throwback to a
time when ketchup didn't have tomato and it had things like, um,
sardines and anchovies, well not sardines by anchovies. So I
like that there were sardines that there were you name it.
And it was probably in Ketchup at some point, so Asia,
(09:09):
maybe Southeast Asia, maybe China. The Brits encountered this on
some of their wild trips abroad, uh and as many
things brought at home, said we love this stuff, let's
try and replicate it. Uh. And then in seventeen thirty
two was one of the first published recipes in the
(09:32):
UK Ketchup in Paste by Richard Bradley. Yeah, Ricky Bradley,
and he did reference the the East Indies as its origin. Yeah,
and then it was still pre tomato. Sure. Yeah, it
was a very pretty a faithful recreation of the fish
sauce that they found the catsie. Um. I'm pretty sure
(09:53):
that's how you say it. I would be very interested
to know how to pronounce it um correctly. But it was.
It was a faithful recreation of it, which was basically
like preserve fish and a sort of brine with some
spices thrown in, um, maybe a little mace, some salt,
some pepper, maybe something like lemon peel. And then yeah,
(10:15):
if you like fish sauce, you would love the original
ketchup because it's basically the same thing. Right, Well, I
do like the sauce, but it's um. You gotta use
it liberally and it's only for certain things. Yeah, yeah,
you know you don't want to just like go throwing
fish sauce on on everything. I don't know, man, if
you love fish sauce, it's it's like it's like with Ketchup,
people will put catchup on just about anything. Well we'll
(10:38):
get to that. So so at first the Brits are like,
blind me, this is really good stuff. Well that's a
good accent. But I I'm not that big on anchovies.
What else can we replace it with? So they started
making their own kind of offshoots of ketchup where they
replace the anchovies with other stuff. Yeah, I mean ushrooms, walnuts, Uh,
(11:03):
what else? Elderberry, yeah, oysters. Yeah. And what they were
going for was that ou mommy flavor. They didn't know
it at the time, because umami wasn't discovered until with
the sixties. I think, Yeah, everybody kind of knew that
it was a thing, but no one had actually like
sussed it out or named it. But that's what they
(11:24):
were going for, was that savory, meaty flavor that you
would get from something like fer minute anchovies, and they
were trying to recreate it, and they did. I mean,
like apparently mushroom catchup uh tasted a lot like Worcestershire
sauce um and then uh, you know, walnut catch up.
Apparently Jane Austen was a big fan of that. And
if you're sitting there thinking of putting this on like
(11:46):
your hot dog, hot dogs weren't invented yet. They that's
not what people were using it for. They were using
it as like a base for stews or um like
meat pies. Things like that. It was like a sauce.
It was a base. It was something that that you
were taking bland food and making it savory with this
bottle of this stuff that was made from fermented something
(12:07):
or other. Well, and they would based it on they
would use it like we can use barbecue sauce. They
would baste it on things while they're cooking um which
I just can't imagine that like basting tomato based. Well,
this is before's tomato, I guess, but this is when
it was mushroom based. Yeah, but you mentioned umami and
(12:28):
your buddy Malcolm Gladwell but an article for The New
Yorker and kind of throwing out the question like why
are there so many kinds of mustard yet to ketch
up as kind of ketchup and his answer was because
it satisfies all the fundamental taste all five sweet, salty, sour, bitter,
and umami. Another answer is that there actually are a
(12:49):
ton of different kinds of ketchup. Well, yeah, I would
this has been as there are mustard. Uh so America
is who first, because tomatoes are are native to North
America and this is where people first started using tomatoes
the base. Yeah, but chuck. It took a really long,
(13:12):
circuitous route to get to that point and the reason why.
In America people were making ketchup, but they were still
doing things like using walnuts and using mushrooms and oysters
as the base of it. Right, they still weren't using tomatoes,
even the tomatoes were everywhere, and that was because the
Europeans and American colonists or European colonists considered tomatoes poisonous,
(13:37):
so they didn't eat tomatoes. They I think they used
them as like ornamental plants or something like that. Finally
some people started to like try them and tried to
convince other people, and then they went through a little
period where they were considered medicine. And then finally somebody
started adding them too to catch up. And the first
tomato catchup recipe appears in an American cookbook to depending
(14:00):
on who you ask, either in eighteen twelve or eighteen
o one. Yeah, the eighteen twelve when uh, well, yeah,
that's the one I found was eighteen twelve, But it
still didn't really really take off until post Civil War, uh,
And this is eighteen seventy one, when a man named
Henry Hines he got together with a doctor, isn't that right? Yes,
(14:22):
that guy um Dr Wiley. I can't remember his first name,
but he shows up in our f D A does
does the FDA protect Americans? Remember that guy who put
together that group of people who would like eat preservatives
until they were poisoned to find out whether something was
poisonous or not. That was the guy who set up
(14:44):
that squad. Yeah, Dr Harvey Washington Wiley. Yeah, So his
whole deal was for for a while there. Ketchup was
had some really nasty chemicals in it. Uh, some of
them had and these were all preservatives. Some of it
was cold tar um that gave it the red color uh,
and then sodium benzoit benzoate and that helped to retard spoilage.
(15:10):
So it was really nasty stuff and he kind of
first championed um that this stuff is harmful to your health.
So he got together with Henry J. Hines, who was
producing Ketchup in eighteen seventy six, and they were like,
you know what if you use really good because at
the time the ketchup they were making was from like
scraps of tomatoes that were kind of kind of like
(15:31):
junk tomatoes, and they said, you know, if you use
good ripe red tomatoes as your base, it has a
natural preservative in it called pecton um, and it really
you know, we got to ramp up the vinegar because
that'll help out with the spoilage, and all of a sudden,
we don't need to use chemicals anymore, right, which was
a huge breakthrough. And the reason why there are so
(15:52):
many preservatives in ketchup was because tomatoes have a pretty
short growing season. It's like mid augu to mid October,
and so the only time during the year you could
make fresh ketchup was those two months, and you couldn't
make a year's worth of ketchup. Like by this time,
people were buying millions of bottles of ketchup in America
(16:13):
alone a year, right, So you couldn't make all that
in two months. So you had to preserve the pulp.
But they took terrible standards and practices to preserving. So
when you opened up that tub of pulp, you know,
come July to make some to make some some new ketchup,
it was totally spoiled, ridden with bacteria. It was very
(16:36):
dangerous stuff to begin with, and that was the basis
that they used to start with. So it was really
bad stuff. And when Hines created this preservative free version
of Ketchup, it was a huge, huge breakthrough. Yeah, and uh,
way back in nine even created that iconic octagonal ketchup
(16:57):
bottle that you cannot buying stores anymore as far as
I know, but you can still get in restaurants. You
can take them from restaurants, just leave an extra good tip.
All right. So let's take a break here and we'll
get back and talk about this foul condiment right after this.
(17:26):
M h. All right, So today, catch up is basically tomatoes, salt, yeah, vinegar, okay,
onion powder or some spice, some kind of sweetener. Uh,
(17:51):
either a lot of sugar or a lot of corn
syrup or high fruit toast corn syrup. Yeah, it's I
think high fruit toast corn serves the standard. And I
think it was Hunts that first came out with a
a brand that didn't have high fruit toast corn syrup,
and they touted it all up and down the avenue
and Hines is far and away, like, since I don't
(18:12):
do catch up. I made the bad mistake of buying
the wrong ketchup one time for Emily. Oh what what
kind did you get it? I think it was hunts,
and you know she was like no, no, no, no, no,
it's like, don't bring any hunts and God forbid any
del Monty ketchup. It's outshold, it's Heinz Heinz Hines in
(18:32):
my house and uh it is far and away the
the leader. I think they have what like sixty or
so percent of the market share that's in the US.
They have about thirty of the global market. So like
not bad Hines is synonymous literally with Ketchup around the world.
That's everybody knows Hinz ketchup. Right. We should have gotten
(18:53):
them as a sponsor, Yeah, we should, But then we
wouldn't have been able to do a show about ketchup values.
Yeah we do, We really do, Chuck, congratulations to you
on your value and so um ketchup is much more standardized.
Depending on who you ask, it's either incredibly toxic or
actually has some health benefits. Could be both. Right, there's
(19:17):
a I said. I think I already said that. There
was a period where tomatoes were seen as medicine. Back
in the day. They had tomato pills. Yeah, they had
tomato pills, and actually they had ketchup pills too. There
was a doctor in Ohio who stole the ideas of
another doctor in Michigan and went to a guy who
was selling patent medicine and said, hey, man, tomatoes are
(19:43):
super healthy, and so by extension, ketchup should be super healthy.
And I believe that they do things like UM treat
indigestion by removing bile from the body, diarrhea, ketchup, got jaundice,
ketchup pills, right about rhematism or headaches? Well, so this
(20:05):
is where it starts to get a little wacky. Right.
They started selling Doctor Mills compound extract of tomato, and
they were successful. It's just back in eighteen thirty five,
and they were successful in a bunch of imitators came
on the market, and UM, all of a sudden it
was not so so great any longer. Well, no, because
a lot of them didn't even have tomatoes in them.
(20:26):
They were fraudulent ketchup pills, or they were laxatives acting
as laxatives, and so that caused the great tomato pill
market crash of eighteen forty. But today we're much smarter
and rather than catchup pills, we take tomato pills also
known as lacapine supplements. Yeah, because like apinas, that's the
good stuff that you're looking for that has been shown
(20:50):
to help cancer patients specifically. I think the one that
they've actually proven is prostate cancer, right, so they haven't
proven it, but that one's shown there's been the most
like positive studies, but even still the jury is still
out on that one. But but yes, prestate cancer is
the one that they roundly point to and say, lycopene
(21:10):
really helps with this, and at least some studies have
shown that they, like a pine, somehow disrupts communication between
cancer cells and um it. It retards the growth of
blood vessels to the cancer cells, so they don't get
they can't grow as well. And apparently the body produces
(21:30):
like apene naturally, but also readily absorbs and uses it too.
And one of the great sources of lycopene is tomatoes.
Lecopeine gives tomatoes, among other things, it's red color. But
the amazing thing about it is, if you eat a
raw tomato right now, you're not going to absorb as
much like a pine as if you ate some ketchup
(21:51):
right now. It's gotta be cooked. Yeah, it releases the likecopiner,
it makes it more readily available to human body. We
should say yeah, but they also say, even if it
does help, it's like, you know, a little catchup on
a hamburger is not nearly enough to really do you
a lot of good. You know, it's something like um
uh to two point five milligrams of lycopene in a
(22:15):
table spoonful ketchup. You say, well, I'll just eat a
bunch of ketchup. The problem is is if you eat,
say like a half a cup about seven tablespoons of ketchup,
but you just have to be a weirdo anyway to
do that, you're getting about three quarters of your daily
sodium intake and four key spoons of added sugar as well,
where you're just better off like eating some tomato sauce instead. Yeah.
(22:39):
But the point is if lycopene helps humans, which the
jury is still out, but it looks like it's possible,
then catch up actually can help humans by giving a
little extra lycopene. That's right, just catch up in your
on your tomato sauce. Yeah, and all these things can
add up time. So Ketchup was was selling well in
(23:04):
America post Civil War you got the tomato going. Now
everyone loves it. But there was a problem early on
with ketchup that took a long long time to fully solve.
Um and I bet you they're still sort of working
on it. Is that ketch up. Anyone who grew up
in the seventies and eighties and loved ketchup at a
(23:25):
diner would have a hard time getting the ketchup out
of that glass bottle, and they were There were all
kinds of tricks. I remember. One of them was that
if you tapped on the fifty seven and the on
the label was that it that it would come out better.
Then you had the jackass who would just smashed the
bottom of it until ketchup would shoot out all across
(23:49):
the table. That works but not well, or the more
sheepish person at the diner might stick a butter knife
in there and be like, die ketchup and go and
coax it out. And the reason all this is happening
is because catch up and this is a good little
dinner party. Factoid. UH is a non Newtonian fluid. So
(24:11):
if you ever change your oil or or even pour
water out of a cup, you will notice that all
pours out at the same rate. It has a single viscosity.
It's a Newtonian fluid Newton's like catch up. It can
start to come out very slowly and then all of
a sudden it starts picking up steam and coming out
(24:33):
of that bottle. And that's when you know you're really cooking. Uh.
That's has different external forces acting upon it to either
increase or decrease that viscosity. Right, So it has multiple viscosities,
which makes it a non Newtonian fluid. Right, And when
you when you put force on its, specifically sheer force,
(24:56):
it changes the viscosity. It actually decreases the viscosity of
the ketchup, which increases the flow rate, which means it
comes out of the bottle faster. And one of the
ways that you can introduce sheer force s h e
A r um is to tap on the bottle. That
concussive force loluses or changes the viscosity and the ketchup
(25:20):
flows more quickly. So it actually is true. Yeah, that
tapping on the embossed fifty seven, the one that was
like embossed on the bottle, that's that's the perfect spot
to tap because if you hit it with the heel
of your palm onto the rear of the bottle, if
you hit it, if you write, if you do that lightly,
(25:44):
all you're doing is is reducing the viscosity of the
ketchup right in the rear. But the stuff toward the
neck of the bottle that you're trying to get out,
it remains highly viscous. Right. If you tap towards the
neck of the bottle, you're going to reduce the viscosity
of the ketchup that's up there in front, and it'll
start to slide out if you hit that thing on
the bottom hard enough that you change the viscosity of
(26:07):
all the catch up inside. Yeah, it's gonna come shooting out,
and you're gonna look like an idiot. All your friends
are gonna laugh at you, and you'll die alone. That's right.
So they had a problem with this, and they thought
in night, what about ketchup packets. This kind of solves
that problem. You can squeeze it out, uh, And they said, yeah,
that's kind of neat. It might do well for restaurants,
(26:28):
but no one's gonna have a ziploc bag full of
ketchup packets in their fridge unless you're my mom, and
they're from like eight different fast food restaurants. Uh, God
bless her um, so that you know those are still around.
But it finally it took till night three to come
up with the plastic squeeze bottle, which still didn't fully
(26:50):
work um because, as this our own article points out,
they made funny farting noises, which I guess is unseemly
at a dinner table. Sure. Uh. And then that what
the industry insiders called serum, that thin, watery kind of
gross stuff that nobody wants on their their hamburger hot
(27:11):
dog catchup juice. Yeah, toward the end, that serum comes
out and nobody wants that. So those squeeze bottles weren't
the ultimate solve. Yeah, it's just it's basically just separated
water separated from the ketchup solids. And there's their actual
academic papers on this conundrum, this problem with serum separation
(27:34):
and catchup. No, I'm sure people trying to figure out
how to how to get get around it. They I
think they've hybridized a new kind of tomato that um
allows for less serum separation once processed in to catch up.
Even what couldn't you to shake it up. I'm a novice,
but yeah, you do. You do shake it up, and
it typically works. But and I think two thousand two
(27:56):
Hinds and Hunts and apparently Hunts was working on at first,
and Heinz got wind of it and started their own project.
But almost simultaneously, Hinds and Hunts released Um, a new
type of squeeze bottle that you could stand upside down.
Such up stayed towards the bottom right, and it was
actually designed to catch the ketchup juice, the serum and
(28:21):
remix it back into the ketchup solids as it flowed out.
That's right. A the dude named Paul Brown Um is
the hero too many because he created the silicone valve
and it wasn't just for ketchup. In fact, I don't
even know if it was. Originally it was for shamp
It was for shampoos. I think that he was trying
(28:42):
to come up with well that makes sense, but he's
a hero to catchup lovers. So these these uh liquid valves,
they had right angle slits cut into the valve, so
when you squeeze a bottle, it flows out nice and neat,
and then they close back up. When you stop squeezing,
which seals it back up inside the bottle, and then
revolutionary it's a dome that has the slits cut into
(29:03):
the side of it, and then around the dome, it's
a place where the serum collects, and then as the
ketchup is moving out, it's supposed to mix back in together.
So funny how much science has gone into this right
just to get the ketchup right, and it still isn't perfect.
Like you, you, anybody who uses this bottle knows that
you still get ketchup juice when you first scored it,
unless you shake it first. Yeah, and even then you're
(29:25):
still gonna get a little serum. It's just a fact
of life, you know. You just you don't want to
You don't want to do it on a bad day
because that can be the thing that that's straw that
just breaks the camels back, you know, where you just
suddenly you're sobbing standing in your kitchen holding that squeeze
bottle of ketchup. See, that's why you go for mayonnaise
because although it is a non Newtonian fluid, uh, there's
(29:46):
no mannaise serum. Did you finish your cupie, manonnaise. Yet
I did, and I need to go to the little
martin near my house to see if they have more,
any any halfway decent Asian market will have it. I'm
sure they do. I mean you can buy uh macha
powder and eel, so I'm sure by this stuff we
will have alright. So two thousand two is when that
(30:08):
new valve was introduced by Hines and Hunts. Uh. It
doesn't mention poor del Monty. I wouldn't feel too bad
for them though they're still They're still sell a lot
of Ketchup. Yeah, they're still making that money. You know.
I want to know. I want to hear from people
though that are like, no, I'm a del Montey man.
There's somebody somebody out there. We want to hear from
(30:28):
the legit ones, not hipster ones. Yeah. Yeah, like I
like Mallard and del Monty Ketchup and PBR I don't um.
So two thousand two was when that was admitted and
then I'm sorry, implemented, and then there was that still
final problem apparently with Ketchup, where you get to the
(30:50):
bottom of the bottle of those squeeze bottles and you
can't get it all out. And that was solved with
a little bit of technology courtesy of m I T
called liquid lied. Yeah. I don't know if they've implemented
this yet. It sounds like, um, adding something that is
really unnecessary that could conceivably be toxic. Oh is it
(31:11):
not in there yet? I don't believe so. From the
House Stuff Works article makes it sound like they've invented
it and they're planning on it. Got you haven't put
it in yet? Yeah. So the thing with liquid glide,
I looked up what that was all about, and I
think the deal is is it essentially sort of is
a coating on the inside of the bottle that makes
the inside of the bottle pre wet in a way. Okay,
(31:34):
that's slippery. That um that What was it that Clark
Griswold came up with in Christmas vacation? That was like
a silicone that he ended up putting on the that's
liquid glide. Yeah. Basically I thought if there was gonna
be any vacation reference in this, it would be real
to me to catch a betty What was that one?
(31:56):
And that was when he spooned. Yeah, he spooned the
catch up on the sandwich and it was kind of
this chunky uh in real to me to catch up,
and he went, nothing but the best clark uh so
liquid glide. By all accounts is they say food safe. Um,
but I always wonder about this stuff, Like I don't
(32:18):
trust the FDA, So I'm not gonna say that I don't.
I don't fully trust the FDA in all cases. So
I just can't imagine that that this that we haven't
been poisoning ourselves all along with food containers. You know,
don't you wonder like if there's going to be that
revelation that like it's a cookbook moment or soil and
(32:42):
green as humans, just that that moment where we come
to realize that this beep whateverything it is is this
is the thing that's been giving everyone who's ever had
cancer since it's been invented cancer, you know, like this
is the smoking one. Uh. Don't you just think that
there's got to be I assume it's just plastics in general.
(33:05):
I think it's a mix of a lot of things
of modern manufacturing, so and farming and pesticides and I mean,
you name it so depressing. Should we take a break. Yeah,
maybe we can pull this one back from the brink.
All right, we're gonna get to catch up versus cats up,
which I know everyone wants to know about. All right, Chuck,
(33:48):
we shouldn't put it off any longer, all right, hit me?
So catch up k E T C h U p
y versus cats up c A T s up. Weird
the a hou stuff Works article I didn't see. I
didn't actually look, but I didn't see this anywhere else.
Is that they're pronounced the same, correct. Have you ever
(34:08):
heard that? So you you've seen people say ketchup and
you knew that in their mind they saw the word
cats up. All right, I did not realize that. I yes,
but I always say ketchup. I say cats up like mockingly,
but I that's how I pronounce it, you know. But
apparently the they're both just bastardizations anglicizations of whatever word
(34:37):
catchup originally comes from either that Fujian um word or
the Malaysian word for for again that that anchovy fermented paste.
And so I think Hines used ketchup starting pretty early on. Correct. Yes,
So that's an interesting story, and you just basically told
(34:57):
the whole thing. Well, yeah, it came Hines, even though
they're like the global the global leader in in ketchup.
They came to the market pretty late, like thirty years
after Ketchup was sold and mass produced in the US.
Hines came along finally, and they wanted to distinguish themselves
from their competitors, so they used ketchup. But ketchup wasn't
(35:20):
a new word. It was the original word. If you
look back at like some of those eighteenth century recipes,
it's ketchup k E T c h up. And then
apparently sometime in the eighteenth century people started calling it
cats up, and so that was the preferred term spelling.
And then Hines distinguished themselves and brought ketchup spelling. This
(35:42):
the popularized spelling with the K back. Because they got
market share, that became the norm exactly. And then so
it was del Monte, who was the big outlier for
years and years and years had when they finally said,
all right, no more cats up, go home with ketchup,
(36:02):
and they did. What about this other thing that I
know a lot of people have argued over um for generations,
is fridge or no fridge? So I mean, it's got
a lot of vinegren. It it's supposedly as far as
Hinz is concerned. They say it's it's shelf stable, meaning
(36:22):
that even after you open it, it's got enough stuff
in it that it's going to stay fine right outside
of the fridge. But they still recommend keeping it in
the fridge. Yeah, they say this is direct quote from Hines.
Whoever the the latest Hinds Air is. I think it's
John Kerry. Oh right, wasn't that wouldn't his wife the
(36:45):
Hinds Air? Yeah, Teresa, Teresa Hines? Right? So John Kerry
says because of its natural cidity, it shall stable. However,
it's stability after opening can be affected by storage conditions,
so we recommend, like any process food, it be refrigerated
after opening. So, in other words, if you live in Yuma, Arizona,
you might not want to keep your catchup in and
(37:06):
you don't have air conditioning. You might not want to
keep your catchup on the table, but you probably could
if you really wanted to. But if you lived in
southern California, where the breeze is always cool and the
air is always clean, then yea, then you might wanna.
You know, you could put it on your table and
you probably be fine. Yeah, and again it's kind of
(37:28):
like a number of different preservatives in it. It's got vinegar,
and it has sugar, which is a preservative, has pecked
and naturally found in tomatoes. It's a preservative. It's probably
gonna be fine, but but keep it in the fridge,
I mean want to. It's almost than us unless you
have like if you don't have enough room in your
fridge for the bottle of cats up, then you have
(37:49):
too much. Uh, salsa and sarracha, right, sar Racha, sa racha,
you hipster, you Saracha is really good actually, and in
fact that as we'll get to that, there are ratcha ketchups.
They're pretty popular these days because this article says millennials
like their spice more than their parents. But depending on
(38:13):
where you are in the world. Uh, there are all
flavors of ketchups and all ways to use ketchup depending
on where you are. Yeah, And I just want to say,
I love how that was put. Can't you see a
hipster's parent coming to them and be like, what do
you like more your spice or me, I like my
spice more than my parents. Well, you know that's not
(38:34):
what they meant, right, I know, but let's take a
tour around the world. I know you were leaning up
to I just had to double back to that. All right,
let's go to uh, let's go to jolly old England
or maybe then as weight Light even because apparently they
like sweeter ketchup in those two places. Yeah. And in
the Philippines they like sweet ketchup, but they like sweet
(38:55):
ketchup that's made from a banana base rather than a
tomato base. But they're not crazy over there, so they
die it red so it looks like tomato ketchup. Yeah.
And we also should say that in England they might
be more apt to reach for the HP sauce before
they catch up though, right, the brown sauce. Yes, they
love that stuff. Yeah. I think that's their number one
condiment over there. HP sauce. What do they just call it?
(39:18):
The brown sauce? They call it the brown, the brown,
that's heroin, big brown, No, big brown. Apparently. Americans, like
we said, uh, well, we eat a lot of catchup,
but we're not the leading consumer because the Fins and
the Canadians love the stuff more than we do even, Yeah,
which is pretty shameful America, pretty shameful. Yeah, mayonnaise and
(39:43):
salsa so um. In China, Jamaica and I believe Thailand
they like to put ketchup on fried chicken. I gotta
try that one. What about pizza, uh, Eastern Eastern Europe apparently,
(40:04):
and Trinidad, India, Japan, in Poland. That's how you know
it's good man. That is a diverse collection of countries
that all put ketchup on their pizza. You know what's
funny is my friend Eddie, I can say all of
these foods ranch dressing. Well, yeah, I mean ranch stressing
should be the number one condiment in the world. Chuck,
(40:25):
hold on, I have to tell you something. You have
to go to Japan one in these days. Right there
are over there they Oh, I thought it was just
understood you have a standing invitation to come to Japan
every time we got because you are the ambassador. All right,
I got the sash and everything, But Japan's misspelled. Um,
it's a They have pizza over there and rather than
(40:48):
tomato sauce. It's gonna knock your socks off. They use
that Japanese mayo what with corn and sometimes ham like
pan chetta or something like that. Right, So you've got
a dough, then you've got a spread of mayonnaise, corn
off the cob and ham. Yes, and it is mind
(41:11):
blowingly good. Is there cheese? I don't remember if there's no.
They're not big on They're not big on cheese or dairy.
They don't have that much room for cows. All the
all the cows they have are like Kobe beef cows.
I think that's what they kind of dedicate their cow
space too. Did ever tell you my story of being
at the Chinese restaurant when I was a kid? Uh?
(41:34):
There was a guy getting take out and uh, he
went through about uh probably about five or six different things,
asking if it had cheese on it, like egg rolds
have cheese on it? Uh, Google, guy pants have cheese
on it? And that the sweet Chinese owner is kind
of an older guy kept saying like no, no, no, no.
And at the very after like the fifth thing, the
(41:56):
guys stopped them and said, uh, and it's very sweet
Chinese American accent that no Chinese food has cheese on it.
Really was the guy just messing with him or something? No, man,
I think, I don't know. I guess he was just unfamiliar.
I mean, this was the nineteen seventies, so uh maybe
he you know, didn't have experience with Chinese food. But
(42:16):
it's funny as an adult to think about, like melted
on Yeah, that's got white American. Uh so Sweden, if
you go to Sweden, they will actually squeeze catch up
over their pasta. That's like, um, honey boo boo. Really yeah,
(42:39):
they used to put and I never really watched this show,
but I mean I was a conscious human being back then,
so I was aware of this. But they would they
would cook pasta and then put butter on it and
then squeeze catch up on him. That was like honey
boo boo spaghetti. Oh my god, no comment. We used
to be colleagues of honey boo boos at one point.
(43:01):
Did they work for Discovery? Yeah, they were all on TLC.
I have to rumor to put at that back to
my resume. Um where where else? What else we got?
What kind of crazy catchups do we have? Okay? So um,
all right, you ready for this one? This is I've
never heard of this before in Canada. Have you ever
(43:23):
had while you wouldn't have, but have you ever seen
ketchup potato chips. Uh, yes, they're pretty good. They're better
than barbecue chips if you ask me. Hairs makes a
good one, right. Apparently the Canadians do some wacky thing
with it where they take can they take ketchup potato
chips and turn it into a catchup cake of some sort.
(43:45):
I've not had this before, but we're gonna be in
Toronto and Vancouver this year, so I express multiple catch
up cakes. But no, really, you don't really have to
make this catch up I should point out to since
we're talking about that tour that uh, Toronto and Vancouver
are far and away leading in ticket sales right now
out of the gate. So Canada, like America, needs to
(44:08):
step it up because Canada is kicking your butts man.
That's the great thing about doing um multinational tours as
you can put one country against the other. Yeah right, yeah,
especially as everybody's kind of devolving into nationalism right now,
you can really get it coming. Uh. You know what
kind of chips that did have the other day was
the the what do you call it? The country gravy
(44:29):
sausage and country gravy las. Yeah. I haven't tried those.
Are they good? Um? Yeah, I mean do you like
white gravy sausage gravy? Sure it tastes like that. Really,
they nailed it. They nailed it, because sometimes those things
are way off. Well, yeah, they have a contest, now,
don't they. Yeah, yeah they do. I'm trying to remember
some of the other ones because they've they've had some
(44:50):
good ones. But um, oh, chicken and waffles. Chicken and
waffles one was really good, was it? Yeah? It had
like just this hint of maple and but yeah, I
kind of tasted a little fried chickenie. It was. It
was good. Um what other kinds of crazy catchups do
we have? What about catch up ice cream? No? Thank you?
(45:13):
So Baskin Robbins apparently came up with it and it
died in the lab. But apparently it was based on
a Hinz ice cream recipe for Hinz carnival cream. So
that was the thing, which I mean again, I would
try this stuff. Did I ever tell you about the
time you and I went to Plaza Fiesta and tried
tuna gelato and it was like it tasted just like
(45:37):
raw tuna. It was insane. Never heard of it before
and never seen it anywhere else. It was like this
one specific place. Had itf youre Ever, if you ever
find yourself in Atlanta, Georgia, was some time to kill,
go to Plaza Fiesta, try to find the gelato place
and see if they have the tuna gelato. They have
a good uh cowboys store over there too. Yeah, they
(45:58):
have a bunch of them, like good good boots, hats
and shirt belts and checkered shirts and brother, if you're
throwing a keen signea, that's where you go. Yeah, I'm
sure so. Lastly, Chuck, we have to give a shout out.
We would be really remiss if we didn't mention that
one of tomato is a or catchup is a big
(46:20):
ingredient in something called pruno. Yeah, we talked about prison
wine in our Prisons episode. I did not. I don't
think I remembered that that was. In fact, maybe I
didn't know. Did we say that it was an ingredient.
I don't think so. I didn't notice it until now.
But it's like part of the It's like you use
(46:41):
that in sugar packets to feed the fermentation process in
a sock. Right. Uh. I don't know if you could
make an ass like I think it needs to be
a little more air type than that, but maybe not.
Maybe you could, although it all just drip out. I'm
not sure, man man for the resp I came across,
(47:02):
it's like in a like a big gallon sized zip
block bag. But yeah, after like they two or three fermentation,
you feed it with ketchup packets and sugar gross. Yeah,
and then you got some pruno, which you should never try.
You got anything else? Yeah, we should cover this thing,
this last thing you sent headline Israel ketchup war forces
(47:23):
Hines to relabel sauce as tomato seasoning. So in Israel,
the leading ketchup maker is uh O s E M
O S M. And they have a sixty six percent
market share. And uh in Israel, as in most countries,
they have food standards where you can only call something
something if it has this much of whatever. And apparently
(47:45):
Israel's standards are much higher than the US or Europe's. Yeah,
so you have to have a certain percentage of tomato
concentrate to be labeled tomato ketchup in Israel. And so
oh Sim even though they have six mark or sixty
six percent market share, went after Hines. They said, hey,
we did a study with an independent lab, it had
(48:09):
no skin in the game, leading European external laboratory, and
they found out that Hines did not have the required
percentage of tomato concentrate. So they can't even call it
ketchup anymore. And I believe it's being enforced over there, right. Yeah,
Well this was from two fifteen, and the thing leaves
off I didn't see any updates, but the article leaves
(48:31):
off that Hines was petitioning with the Health ministry to
change the tomato concentrate requirements down to something like six. Well,
here's the thing is, Hines said their claims have no substance. Well,
then why are they lobbying to get the percentage lowered? Right?
And I think what happened was Hines was selling the
(48:54):
same catchup that they sell in Europe and America. And
this is just speculation on my part, but they were
probably selling the same ketchup that they sell elsewhere but
in Israel. But Israel has higher food standards at least
as far as their ketchup goes, and their competitor nail
them on it. That's what I think happened. But yeah,
(49:14):
they can't on the label that they can call it
ketch up. In English, but they can't call it ketchup
in in Hebrew, they can only call it a seasoning
malk ah. It's pretty funny, it is. It's a funny world.
Chuck it and now ketchup is done. I guess I
didn't think it would take us in our nine hundreds
(49:37):
something episode to finally get to ketchup, but we did well,
and this now freeze up. Now I have permission to
request mayonnaise. Okay, that's a deal, we'll do that all right.
Maybe we should just have condiment month. Okay, I like
the sound of that. Well. In the meantime, if you
(49:57):
want to learn more about ketchup, you can type that
in the search bar how stuff works dot com. You
can also check out that geo's articles on it. Like
I said, fast Code Design, Mental Flaws had a great one,
and we got some stuff from our friends at list
Verse who had a pretty interesting compilation of some cool
tomato facts or catch up facts. And since I said
(50:21):
tomato instead of catch up, it's time for listener mail,
I'm gonna call this wow signal update. Um, did you
get tweets about this? It didn't ignore them all? Because
I think this is a lie. Oh, all right, Well,
so I think it's propaganda. Here we go. Then, Hey, guys, first,
want to let you know that I love the show.
I always look forward to new episodes Tuesday Thursday, as
(50:43):
well as the selects on Saturday. I know you would
be interested to find out that I saw news article
the other day that states that an experiment was ran
earlier this year based on a paper from the claimed
the Wow signal was caused by hydrogen clouds from comments
which transisted, uh, transisted, transited that area of the sky
(51:07):
back in nine seven. In January this year, those comments
transited once again and it was determined they were indeed
the source of the signal. Of course, this sparked quite
a bit of controversy among those hoping that this was
a sign of alien life. But the last it appears
that wasn't. So I can't help but be a little disappointed.
Ever since learning of the Wild signal, I knew it
was a long shot. Anyway, keep up great work. I
(51:29):
love to see you in Charleston, South Carolina someday. I'm
sure you'd love that city. And Sean Flanagan, I do
love Charleston. Yeah, Charleston is a top notch Town. Yeah,
I don't know if that's has enough people for us
to go, but maybe I don't know. People might come
from around the southeast to that show. Who knows that
(51:50):
Heckley went to Birmingham. Lets go to Charleston. Yeah, it's
I mean us playing there is a good enough reason
to get people to go to Charleston. Maybe Bill Murray
would come. Oh yeah, is he still there? And know
his family is Yeah, he lives there. Okay, I mean
he's I think he's got more than one place, but
I think he Well, I'll tell you what, if you're listening,
(52:10):
we'll list you for our show if you'll come. He's
just crazy enough to show up. Yeah. So that's from
Sean and uh we had a lot of people right
in about the Wild Signal. So yeah, disappointing that everybody
bought into it, like, oh no, it's not Aliens, it's
this hydrogen cloud. Stupid comments. Well, if you want to
(52:32):
get in touch with us, you can tweet to us
or at s y s K podcast that I'm at,
Josh Underscore, um Underscore Clark. You can hang out with
Chuck on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant or at
Stuff you Should Know. You can send us all an
email to Stuff podcast at how Stuffworks dot com and
has always joined us at our home on the web.
(52:52):
Stuff you Should Know dot com For more on this
and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works
dot com MHM
Josh, my friend. If you are a listener of ours
and you live in Chicago, Toronto, Vancouver, Austin, Brooklyn, Minneapolis, Kansas,
right here in Atlanta, you can come see us on
tour starting in August and finishing up in November. Is
that right? Yeah, that's right man. It's our two thousand
and seventeen North America Monsters of Podcasting Tour that I
(00:21):
like the sounds of that. Eddie van Halen is opening, Yeah,
he is, but not really, No, not really. But you
can find out all the information and all the deats
at s y s K live dot com are Squarespace
Live touring home on the web, and we hope to
see everyone out there. Welcome to Stuff you should Know
from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to
(00:49):
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant,
there's guest producer. No, there's this stuff you should know.
I hate ketchup? Do you really? Yeah? Really? Yeah? Do
you like tomato sauce like Capasta? Sure? Love it? Do
you like tomato soup? D don't love it? I'll I'll
(01:14):
choke it down though. So I'm starting to see a
spectrum emerge here. Oh yeah, I don't. I don't go
for raw tomato much. Well, I love cooked pasta sauce. Yeah,
but I'm a mayonnaise guy at heart. So we're talking condiments.
You know. One thing about the the Derrito effect that
it kind of ruined me a little bit on food.
(01:35):
Like I'll be like, oh, this is a good tomato,
and then some part of my brains like, yeah, well
it's not in nineteen forties tomato. You don't know what
a good tomato is. What do you mean, like like
a Jersey tomato versus h you know, just some other
stupid tomato. No, supposedly, like just the agricultural production in
(01:57):
the US is so homogenized now that like we've lost
all these great heirloom varieties of especially tomato, and the
stuff that that most people get that are tomatoes are
just no, they're no good compared to how they used
to be. Oh, you hit up a farmer's market, sure,
but even still grow that junk yourself right there, you go,
(02:18):
or build the time machine, take the way back machine,
and get some tomato. We got that our disposal. What's
your what's your problem? I'm just cheap. I don't like
to spend it on the Yeah, well that's a funny
chuck that you like mayonnaise, because did you know? Did
you know before this I should say that the number
one condiment for sales wise in the United States is mayonnaise.
(02:41):
I did not know that. And when I saw that,
that surprised me a and it surprised me b that
it was that much more than Ketchup. I figured Ketchup
would be far and away the winter because I always
feel like the ultimate weirdo for not liking ketchup. So
what is it about Ketchup? You know, all the taste? Okay,
(03:03):
that's a pretty good reason not to like. I'm not
wild about vinegar based things. Oh. I do like balsamic vinegar,
but a lot of the other vinegars I'm not crazy about.
That's one of the reasons I don't like pickled things, right,
But so vinegar based things, Um, it's really sweet. Um.
Then I don't love sweet condiments. Um. Have you ever
(03:27):
had curry? Catchup? No? I don't. I don't need to
catch up. Oh I see. Uh. And then the when
I was a kid, I can't lie. It probably gross
me out a little bit because yeah, that was Oh
my god, Oh that's disturbing. Um, the blood thing, you know,
(03:52):
I probably thought, you know, it grossed me out because
we would use it as blood for play acting in things.
So yeah, just not into Those are some solid reasons
to not like catch up. Plus, I don't know if
people would probably argue that catchupimanes are great together, but um,
once you're on the Mayo train, to mix up another
(04:12):
condiment with it just doesn't make sense to me. I
I don't. I don't discriminate all. I like most, if
not all, condiments. So like catch up, mayo and mustard
on a burger is good? Do you? Yes? I can't.
It's not like I can't eat it without it, like
I've actually found, Um, I can eat burgers without catchup
(04:33):
now I'm a grown up. But I do like a
little bit of catchup on there, a little bit of
mustard and then yes, definitely mayo. Well, Emily loves catch
up so much that she calls French fries a catchup
delivery system that makes sense their vehicle for it. Tell
her to try curry catchup, it'll knock her socks off.
(04:54):
I totally will. Um. Yeah, but you don't like catch up,
so you wouldn' like this. But if she likes ketchup,
even if she doesn't like curry, she may still like
curry ketchup. Well, then she's gonna love curry ketch up.
So mayonnaise is the number one condiment in the United States.
(05:14):
It's a big surprise, which must mean catch up is
number two. Yeah, which, by the way, I had mentioned
how much more. I think it was about two billion
dollars to eight hundred thousand, eight hundred million dollars, which
is that's more than double. That kind of surprised me. Yeah,
it is very surprising. What's even more surprising is I
was being facetious because ketchup isn't even the number two
(05:35):
condiments in the United States. That's right. It's also had
a big surge in the like eighties and nineties. That's
because people like to say salsa. Catch up is number three, right,
at least it's got mustard beat. For Pete's sake, What
is this the you you know yet of American households
(05:56):
have a bottle of ketchup in there? Well, it's his kitchens.
But will get to the fridge non fridge thing later. So, yes,
everybody loves ketchup. Especially in America because it's obviously an
American invention. Everybody knows that John Wayne's grandfather inventing ketchup
while he was sailing his forward truck down the Mississippi River,
(06:16):
and one day a magical bottle Budweiser came and whispered
the recipians here, and they commemorated the event by tuning
off fireworks. I love it, and that's how ketchup was born.
Everybody knows that fireworks right pretty neat. No, that's not true.
Although I take a little bit of issue with this
(06:37):
because ketchup was first created in Asia and China, and
about I should say, I saw they think maybe the
Chinese got it from the Vietnamese. Yeah, I saw that too. Um.
But as you will see, these recipes that were originally
for preserving fish, it's hey, they didn't have tomatoes at all.
(07:00):
Came in America much later. But it's so not like
ketchup to me, it's you can't even trace it back
and say like, yep, that's ketchup. That's the point. And
even linking these things, because you can link them like
it's it. That's the fascinating thing to me about it.
It's like American ketchup. What we think of his ketch
up here in the States, like hinz fifty seven stuff, right,
(07:22):
is it's a species that evolved, not hine fifty seven sauce,
but Hinz ketchup. What everybody thinks of his ketchup. Right,
It's a species that evolved from an ancestor. That that is,
it can directly trace its lineage right back to this
ketchup in in Asia, so much so that the word
(07:42):
ketchup is an anglicization of either a melee word that
was borrowed from the Cantonese or a hokey in South
China Fujian province word. Either way, it was something like
catch you, and it meant a fermented fish paste. It's
(08:04):
like when when you go to the store today and
you buy fish sauce. That's that's that was, that's the
progenitor of ketchup. That's where ketchup came from. Yeah, I mean,
I guess that makes sense. It's just to me, it's
changed so much. It's almost like, Uh, you should just
draw a line, and I guess that line would be
pre tomato and post tomato. I think, yeah, I think
(08:25):
that's pretty fair to say, yeah, pre tomato and post tomato,
you can. You can definitely draw a line because if
you look at Hinz Ketchup bottles, it says clearly tomato Ketchup.
And there's this really great I think it was a
Fast Code design article by a guy named John Brownlee
who points out, like, why would they even bother putting
tomato on the label. Of course it's tomato ketchup, you idiot.
(08:49):
And the reason is because that's a throwback to a
time when ketchup didn't have tomato and it had things like, um,
sardines and anchovies, well not sardines by anchovies. So I
like that there were sardines that there were you name it.
And it was probably in Ketchup at some point, so Asia,
(09:09):
maybe Southeast Asia, maybe China. The Brits encountered this on
some of their wild trips abroad, uh and as many
things brought at home, said we love this stuff, let's
try and replicate it. Uh. And then in seventeen thirty
two was one of the first published recipes in the
(09:32):
UK Ketchup in Paste by Richard Bradley. Yeah, Ricky Bradley,
and he did reference the the East Indies as its origin. Yeah,
and then it was still pre tomato. Sure. Yeah, it
was a very pretty a faithful recreation of the fish
sauce that they found the catsie. Um. I'm pretty sure
(09:53):
that's how you say it. I would be very interested
to know how to pronounce it um correctly. But it was.
It was a faithful recreation of it, which was basically
like preserve fish and a sort of brine with some
spices thrown in, um, maybe a little mace, some salt,
some pepper, maybe something like lemon peel. And then yeah,
(10:15):
if you like fish sauce, you would love the original
ketchup because it's basically the same thing. Right, Well, I
do like the sauce, but it's um. You gotta use
it liberally and it's only for certain things. Yeah, yeah,
you know you don't want to just like go throwing
fish sauce on on everything. I don't know, man, if
you love fish sauce, it's it's like it's like with Ketchup,
people will put catchup on just about anything. Well we'll
(10:38):
get to that. So so at first the Brits are like,
blind me, this is really good stuff. Well that's a
good accent. But I I'm not that big on anchovies.
What else can we replace it with? So they started
making their own kind of offshoots of ketchup where they
replace the anchovies with other stuff. Yeah, I mean ushrooms, walnuts, Uh,
(11:03):
what else? Elderberry, yeah, oysters. Yeah. And what they were
going for was that ou mommy flavor. They didn't know
it at the time, because umami wasn't discovered until with
the sixties. I think, Yeah, everybody kind of knew that
it was a thing, but no one had actually like
sussed it out or named it. But that's what they
(11:24):
were going for, was that savory, meaty flavor that you
would get from something like fer minute anchovies, and they
were trying to recreate it, and they did. I mean,
like apparently mushroom catchup uh tasted a lot like Worcestershire
sauce um and then uh, you know, walnut catch up.
Apparently Jane Austen was a big fan of that. And
if you're sitting there thinking of putting this on like
(11:46):
your hot dog, hot dogs weren't invented yet. They that's
not what people were using it for. They were using
it as like a base for stews or um like
meat pies. Things like that. It was like a sauce.
It was a base. It was something that that you
were taking bland food and making it savory with this
bottle of this stuff that was made from fermented something
(12:07):
or other. Well, and they would based it on they
would use it like we can use barbecue sauce. They
would baste it on things while they're cooking um which
I just can't imagine that like basting tomato based. Well,
this is before's tomato, I guess, but this is when
it was mushroom based. Yeah, but you mentioned umami and
(12:28):
your buddy Malcolm Gladwell but an article for The New
Yorker and kind of throwing out the question like why
are there so many kinds of mustard yet to ketch
up as kind of ketchup and his answer was because
it satisfies all the fundamental taste all five sweet, salty, sour, bitter,
and umami. Another answer is that there actually are a
(12:49):
ton of different kinds of ketchup. Well, yeah, I would
this has been as there are mustard. Uh so America
is who first, because tomatoes are are native to North
America and this is where people first started using tomatoes
the base. Yeah, but chuck. It took a really long,
(13:12):
circuitous route to get to that point and the reason why.
In America people were making ketchup, but they were still
doing things like using walnuts and using mushrooms and oysters
as the base of it. Right, they still weren't using tomatoes,
even the tomatoes were everywhere, and that was because the
Europeans and American colonists or European colonists considered tomatoes poisonous,
(13:37):
so they didn't eat tomatoes. They I think they used
them as like ornamental plants or something like that. Finally
some people started to like try them and tried to
convince other people, and then they went through a little
period where they were considered medicine. And then finally somebody
started adding them too to catch up. And the first
tomato catchup recipe appears in an American cookbook to depending
(14:00):
on who you ask, either in eighteen twelve or eighteen
o one. Yeah, the eighteen twelve when uh, well, yeah,
that's the one I found was eighteen twelve, But it
still didn't really really take off until post Civil War, uh,
And this is eighteen seventy one, when a man named
Henry Hines he got together with a doctor, isn't that right? Yes,
(14:22):
that guy um Dr Wiley. I can't remember his first name,
but he shows up in our f D A does
does the FDA protect Americans? Remember that guy who put
together that group of people who would like eat preservatives
until they were poisoned to find out whether something was
poisonous or not. That was the guy who set up
(14:44):
that squad. Yeah, Dr Harvey Washington Wiley. Yeah, So his
whole deal was for for a while there. Ketchup was
had some really nasty chemicals in it. Uh, some of
them had and these were all preservatives. Some of it
was cold tar um that gave it the red color uh,
and then sodium benzoit benzoate and that helped to retard spoilage.
(15:10):
So it was really nasty stuff and he kind of
first championed um that this stuff is harmful to your health.
So he got together with Henry J. Hines, who was
producing Ketchup in eighteen seventy six, and they were like,
you know what if you use really good because at
the time the ketchup they were making was from like
scraps of tomatoes that were kind of kind of like
(15:31):
junk tomatoes, and they said, you know, if you use
good ripe red tomatoes as your base, it has a
natural preservative in it called pecton um, and it really
you know, we got to ramp up the vinegar because
that'll help out with the spoilage, and all of a sudden,
we don't need to use chemicals anymore, right, which was
a huge breakthrough. And the reason why there are so
(15:52):
many preservatives in ketchup was because tomatoes have a pretty
short growing season. It's like mid augu to mid October,
and so the only time during the year you could
make fresh ketchup was those two months, and you couldn't
make a year's worth of ketchup. Like by this time,
people were buying millions of bottles of ketchup in America
(16:13):
alone a year, right, So you couldn't make all that
in two months. So you had to preserve the pulp.
But they took terrible standards and practices to preserving. So
when you opened up that tub of pulp, you know,
come July to make some to make some some new ketchup,
it was totally spoiled, ridden with bacteria. It was very
(16:36):
dangerous stuff to begin with, and that was the basis
that they used to start with. So it was really
bad stuff. And when Hines created this preservative free version
of Ketchup, it was a huge, huge breakthrough. Yeah, and uh,
way back in nine even created that iconic octagonal ketchup
(16:57):
bottle that you cannot buying stores anymore as far as
I know, but you can still get in restaurants. You
can take them from restaurants, just leave an extra good tip.
All right. So let's take a break here and we'll
get back and talk about this foul condiment right after this.
(17:26):
M h. All right, So today, catch up is basically tomatoes, salt, yeah, vinegar, okay,
onion powder or some spice, some kind of sweetener. Uh,
(17:51):
either a lot of sugar or a lot of corn
syrup or high fruit toast corn syrup. Yeah, it's I
think high fruit toast corn serves the standard. And I
think it was Hunts that first came out with a
a brand that didn't have high fruit toast corn syrup,
and they touted it all up and down the avenue
and Hines is far and away, like, since I don't
(18:12):
do catch up. I made the bad mistake of buying
the wrong ketchup one time for Emily. Oh what what
kind did you get it? I think it was hunts,
and you know she was like no, no, no, no, no,
it's like, don't bring any hunts and God forbid any
del Monty ketchup. It's outshold, it's Heinz Heinz Hines in
(18:32):
my house and uh it is far and away the
the leader. I think they have what like sixty or
so percent of the market share that's in the US.
They have about thirty of the global market. So like
not bad Hines is synonymous literally with Ketchup around the world.
That's everybody knows Hinz ketchup. Right. We should have gotten
(18:53):
them as a sponsor, Yeah, we should, But then we
wouldn't have been able to do a show about ketchup values.
Yeah we do, We really do, Chuck, congratulations to you
on your value and so um ketchup is much more standardized.
Depending on who you ask, it's either incredibly toxic or
actually has some health benefits. Could be both. Right, there's
(19:17):
a I said. I think I already said that. There
was a period where tomatoes were seen as medicine. Back
in the day. They had tomato pills. Yeah, they had
tomato pills, and actually they had ketchup pills too. There
was a doctor in Ohio who stole the ideas of
another doctor in Michigan and went to a guy who
was selling patent medicine and said, hey, man, tomatoes are
(19:43):
super healthy, and so by extension, ketchup should be super healthy.
And I believe that they do things like UM treat
indigestion by removing bile from the body, diarrhea, ketchup, got jaundice,
ketchup pills, right about rhematism or headaches? Well, so this
(20:05):
is where it starts to get a little wacky. Right.
They started selling Doctor Mills compound extract of tomato, and
they were successful. It's just back in eighteen thirty five,
and they were successful in a bunch of imitators came
on the market, and UM, all of a sudden it
was not so so great any longer. Well, no, because
a lot of them didn't even have tomatoes in them.
(20:26):
They were fraudulent ketchup pills, or they were laxatives acting
as laxatives, and so that caused the great tomato pill
market crash of eighteen forty. But today we're much smarter
and rather than catchup pills, we take tomato pills also
known as lacapine supplements. Yeah, because like apinas, that's the
good stuff that you're looking for that has been shown
(20:50):
to help cancer patients specifically. I think the one that
they've actually proven is prostate cancer, right, so they haven't
proven it, but that one's shown there's been the most
like positive studies, but even still the jury is still
out on that one. But but yes, prestate cancer is
the one that they roundly point to and say, lycopene
(21:10):
really helps with this, and at least some studies have
shown that they, like a pine, somehow disrupts communication between
cancer cells and um it. It retards the growth of
blood vessels to the cancer cells, so they don't get
they can't grow as well. And apparently the body produces
(21:30):
like apene naturally, but also readily absorbs and uses it too.
And one of the great sources of lycopene is tomatoes.
Lecopeine gives tomatoes, among other things, it's red color. But
the amazing thing about it is, if you eat a
raw tomato right now, you're not going to absorb as
much like a pine as if you ate some ketchup
(21:51):
right now. It's gotta be cooked. Yeah, it releases the likecopiner,
it makes it more readily available to human body. We
should say yeah, but they also say, even if it
does help, it's like, you know, a little catchup on
a hamburger is not nearly enough to really do you
a lot of good. You know, it's something like um
uh to two point five milligrams of lycopene in a
(22:15):
table spoonful ketchup. You say, well, I'll just eat a
bunch of ketchup. The problem is is if you eat,
say like a half a cup about seven tablespoons of ketchup,
but you just have to be a weirdo anyway to
do that, you're getting about three quarters of your daily
sodium intake and four key spoons of added sugar as well,
where you're just better off like eating some tomato sauce instead. Yeah.
(22:39):
But the point is if lycopene helps humans, which the
jury is still out, but it looks like it's possible,
then catch up actually can help humans by giving a
little extra lycopene. That's right, just catch up in your
on your tomato sauce. Yeah, and all these things can
add up time. So Ketchup was was selling well in
(23:04):
America post Civil War you got the tomato going. Now
everyone loves it. But there was a problem early on
with ketchup that took a long long time to fully solve.
Um and I bet you they're still sort of working
on it. Is that ketch up. Anyone who grew up
in the seventies and eighties and loved ketchup at a
(23:25):
diner would have a hard time getting the ketchup out
of that glass bottle, and they were There were all
kinds of tricks. I remember. One of them was that
if you tapped on the fifty seven and the on
the label was that it that it would come out better.
Then you had the jackass who would just smashed the
bottom of it until ketchup would shoot out all across
(23:49):
the table. That works but not well, or the more
sheepish person at the diner might stick a butter knife
in there and be like, die ketchup and go and
coax it out. And the reason all this is happening
is because catch up and this is a good little
dinner party. Factoid. UH is a non Newtonian fluid. So
(24:11):
if you ever change your oil or or even pour
water out of a cup, you will notice that all
pours out at the same rate. It has a single viscosity.
It's a Newtonian fluid Newton's like catch up. It can
start to come out very slowly and then all of
a sudden it starts picking up steam and coming out
(24:33):
of that bottle. And that's when you know you're really cooking. Uh.
That's has different external forces acting upon it to either
increase or decrease that viscosity. Right, So it has multiple viscosities,
which makes it a non Newtonian fluid. Right, And when
you when you put force on its, specifically sheer force,
(24:56):
it changes the viscosity. It actually decreases the viscosity of
the ketchup, which increases the flow rate, which means it
comes out of the bottle faster. And one of the
ways that you can introduce sheer force s h e
A r um is to tap on the bottle. That
concussive force loluses or changes the viscosity and the ketchup
(25:20):
flows more quickly. So it actually is true. Yeah, that
tapping on the embossed fifty seven, the one that was
like embossed on the bottle, that's that's the perfect spot
to tap because if you hit it with the heel
of your palm onto the rear of the bottle, if
you hit it, if you write, if you do that lightly,
(25:44):
all you're doing is is reducing the viscosity of the
ketchup right in the rear. But the stuff toward the
neck of the bottle that you're trying to get out,
it remains highly viscous. Right. If you tap towards the
neck of the bottle, you're going to reduce the viscosity
of the ketchup that's up there in front, and it'll
start to slide out if you hit that thing on
the bottom hard enough that you change the viscosity of
(26:07):
all the catch up inside. Yeah, it's gonna come shooting out,
and you're gonna look like an idiot. All your friends
are gonna laugh at you, and you'll die alone. That's right.
So they had a problem with this, and they thought
in night, what about ketchup packets. This kind of solves
that problem. You can squeeze it out, uh, And they said, yeah,
that's kind of neat. It might do well for restaurants,
(26:28):
but no one's gonna have a ziploc bag full of
ketchup packets in their fridge unless you're my mom, and
they're from like eight different fast food restaurants. Uh, God
bless her um, so that you know those are still around.
But it finally it took till night three to come
up with the plastic squeeze bottle, which still didn't fully
(26:50):
work um because, as this our own article points out,
they made funny farting noises, which I guess is unseemly
at a dinner table. Sure. Uh. And then that what
the industry insiders called serum, that thin, watery kind of
gross stuff that nobody wants on their their hamburger hot
(27:11):
dog catchup juice. Yeah, toward the end, that serum comes
out and nobody wants that. So those squeeze bottles weren't
the ultimate solve. Yeah, it's just it's basically just separated
water separated from the ketchup solids. And there's their actual
academic papers on this conundrum, this problem with serum separation
(27:34):
and catchup. No, I'm sure people trying to figure out
how to how to get get around it. They I
think they've hybridized a new kind of tomato that um
allows for less serum separation once processed in to catch up.
Even what couldn't you to shake it up. I'm a novice,
but yeah, you do. You do shake it up, and
it typically works. But and I think two thousand two
(27:56):
Hinds and Hunts and apparently Hunts was working on at first,
and Heinz got wind of it and started their own project.
But almost simultaneously, Hinds and Hunts released Um, a new
type of squeeze bottle that you could stand upside down.
Such up stayed towards the bottom right, and it was
actually designed to catch the ketchup juice, the serum and
(28:21):
remix it back into the ketchup solids as it flowed out.
That's right. A the dude named Paul Brown Um is
the hero too many because he created the silicone valve
and it wasn't just for ketchup. In fact, I don't
even know if it was. Originally it was for shamp
It was for shampoos. I think that he was trying
(28:42):
to come up with well that makes sense, but he's
a hero to catchup lovers. So these these uh liquid valves,
they had right angle slits cut into the valve, so
when you squeeze a bottle, it flows out nice and neat,
and then they close back up. When you stop squeezing,
which seals it back up inside the bottle, and then
revolutionary it's a dome that has the slits cut into
(29:03):
the side of it, and then around the dome, it's
a place where the serum collects, and then as the
ketchup is moving out, it's supposed to mix back in together.
So funny how much science has gone into this right
just to get the ketchup right, and it still isn't perfect.
Like you, you, anybody who uses this bottle knows that
you still get ketchup juice when you first scored it,
unless you shake it first. Yeah, and even then you're
(29:25):
still gonna get a little serum. It's just a fact
of life, you know. You just you don't want to
You don't want to do it on a bad day
because that can be the thing that that's straw that
just breaks the camels back, you know, where you just
suddenly you're sobbing standing in your kitchen holding that squeeze
bottle of ketchup. See, that's why you go for mayonnaise
because although it is a non Newtonian fluid, uh, there's
(29:46):
no mannaise serum. Did you finish your cupie, manonnaise. Yet
I did, and I need to go to the little
martin near my house to see if they have more,
any any halfway decent Asian market will have it. I'm
sure they do. I mean you can buy uh macha
powder and eel, so I'm sure by this stuff we
will have alright. So two thousand two is when that
(30:08):
new valve was introduced by Hines and Hunts. Uh. It
doesn't mention poor del Monty. I wouldn't feel too bad
for them though they're still They're still sell a lot
of Ketchup. Yeah, they're still making that money. You know.
I want to know. I want to hear from people
though that are like, no, I'm a del Montey man.
There's somebody somebody out there. We want to hear from
(30:28):
the legit ones, not hipster ones. Yeah. Yeah, like I
like Mallard and del Monty Ketchup and PBR I don't um.
So two thousand two was when that was admitted and
then I'm sorry, implemented, and then there was that still
final problem apparently with Ketchup, where you get to the
(30:50):
bottom of the bottle of those squeeze bottles and you
can't get it all out. And that was solved with
a little bit of technology courtesy of m I T
called liquid lied. Yeah. I don't know if they've implemented
this yet. It sounds like, um, adding something that is
really unnecessary that could conceivably be toxic. Oh is it
(31:11):
not in there yet? I don't believe so. From the
House Stuff Works article makes it sound like they've invented
it and they're planning on it. Got you haven't put
it in yet? Yeah. So the thing with liquid glide,
I looked up what that was all about, and I
think the deal is is it essentially sort of is
a coating on the inside of the bottle that makes
the inside of the bottle pre wet in a way. Okay,
(31:34):
that's slippery. That um that What was it that Clark
Griswold came up with in Christmas vacation? That was like
a silicone that he ended up putting on the that's
liquid glide. Yeah. Basically I thought if there was gonna
be any vacation reference in this, it would be real
to me to catch a betty What was that one?
(31:56):
And that was when he spooned. Yeah, he spooned the
catch up on the sandwich and it was kind of
this chunky uh in real to me to catch up,
and he went, nothing but the best clark uh so
liquid glide. By all accounts is they say food safe. Um,
but I always wonder about this stuff, Like I don't
(32:18):
trust the FDA, So I'm not gonna say that I don't.
I don't fully trust the FDA in all cases. So
I just can't imagine that that this that we haven't
been poisoning ourselves all along with food containers. You know,
don't you wonder like if there's going to be that
revelation that like it's a cookbook moment or soil and
(32:42):
green as humans, just that that moment where we come
to realize that this beep whateverything it is is this
is the thing that's been giving everyone who's ever had
cancer since it's been invented cancer, you know, like this
is the smoking one. Uh. Don't you just think that
there's got to be I assume it's just plastics in general.
(33:05):
I think it's a mix of a lot of things
of modern manufacturing, so and farming and pesticides and I mean,
you name it so depressing. Should we take a break. Yeah,
maybe we can pull this one back from the brink.
All right, we're gonna get to catch up versus cats up,
which I know everyone wants to know about. All right, Chuck,
(33:48):
we shouldn't put it off any longer, all right, hit me?
So catch up k E T C h U p
y versus cats up c A T s up. Weird
the a hou stuff Works article I didn't see. I
didn't actually look, but I didn't see this anywhere else.
Is that they're pronounced the same, correct. Have you ever
(34:08):
heard that? So you you've seen people say ketchup and
you knew that in their mind they saw the word
cats up. All right, I did not realize that. I yes,
but I always say ketchup. I say cats up like mockingly,
but I that's how I pronounce it, you know. But
apparently the they're both just bastardizations anglicizations of whatever word
(34:37):
catchup originally comes from either that Fujian um word or
the Malaysian word for for again that that anchovy fermented paste.
And so I think Hines used ketchup starting pretty early on. Correct. Yes,
So that's an interesting story, and you just basically told
(34:57):
the whole thing. Well, yeah, it came Hines, even though
they're like the global the global leader in in ketchup.
They came to the market pretty late, like thirty years
after Ketchup was sold and mass produced in the US.
Hines came along finally, and they wanted to distinguish themselves
from their competitors, so they used ketchup. But ketchup wasn't
(35:20):
a new word. It was the original word. If you
look back at like some of those eighteenth century recipes,
it's ketchup k E T c h up. And then
apparently sometime in the eighteenth century people started calling it
cats up, and so that was the preferred term spelling.
And then Hines distinguished themselves and brought ketchup spelling. This
(35:42):
the popularized spelling with the K back. Because they got
market share, that became the norm exactly. And then so
it was del Monte, who was the big outlier for
years and years and years had when they finally said,
all right, no more cats up, go home with ketchup,
(36:02):
and they did. What about this other thing that I
know a lot of people have argued over um for generations,
is fridge or no fridge? So I mean, it's got
a lot of vinegren. It it's supposedly as far as
Hinz is concerned. They say it's it's shelf stable, meaning
(36:22):
that even after you open it, it's got enough stuff
in it that it's going to stay fine right outside
of the fridge. But they still recommend keeping it in
the fridge. Yeah, they say this is direct quote from Hines.
Whoever the the latest Hinds Air is. I think it's
John Kerry. Oh right, wasn't that wouldn't his wife the
(36:45):
Hinds Air? Yeah, Teresa, Teresa Hines? Right? So John Kerry
says because of its natural cidity, it shall stable. However,
it's stability after opening can be affected by storage conditions,
so we recommend, like any process food, it be refrigerated
after opening. So, in other words, if you live in Yuma, Arizona,
you might not want to keep your catchup in and
(37:06):
you don't have air conditioning. You might not want to
keep your catchup on the table, but you probably could
if you really wanted to. But if you lived in
southern California, where the breeze is always cool and the
air is always clean, then yea, then you might wanna.
You know, you could put it on your table and
you probably be fine. Yeah, and again it's kind of
(37:28):
like a number of different preservatives in it. It's got vinegar,
and it has sugar, which is a preservative, has pecked
and naturally found in tomatoes. It's a preservative. It's probably
gonna be fine, but but keep it in the fridge,
I mean want to. It's almost than us unless you
have like if you don't have enough room in your
fridge for the bottle of cats up, then you have
(37:49):
too much. Uh, salsa and sarracha, right, sar Racha, sa racha,
you hipster, you Saracha is really good actually, and in
fact that as we'll get to that, there are ratcha ketchups.
They're pretty popular these days because this article says millennials
like their spice more than their parents. But depending on
(38:13):
where you are in the world. Uh, there are all
flavors of ketchups and all ways to use ketchup depending
on where you are. Yeah, And I just want to say,
I love how that was put. Can't you see a
hipster's parent coming to them and be like, what do
you like more your spice or me, I like my
spice more than my parents. Well, you know that's not
(38:34):
what they meant, right, I know, but let's take a
tour around the world. I know you were leaning up
to I just had to double back to that. All right,
let's go to uh, let's go to jolly old England
or maybe then as weight Light even because apparently they
like sweeter ketchup in those two places. Yeah. And in
the Philippines they like sweet ketchup, but they like sweet
(38:55):
ketchup that's made from a banana base rather than a
tomato base. But they're not crazy over there, so they
die it red so it looks like tomato ketchup. Yeah.
And we also should say that in England they might
be more apt to reach for the HP sauce before
they catch up though, right, the brown sauce. Yes, they
love that stuff. Yeah. I think that's their number one
condiment over there. HP sauce. What do they just call it?
(39:18):
The brown sauce? They call it the brown, the brown,
that's heroin, big brown, No, big brown. Apparently. Americans, like
we said, uh, well, we eat a lot of catchup,
but we're not the leading consumer because the Fins and
the Canadians love the stuff more than we do even, Yeah,
which is pretty shameful America, pretty shameful. Yeah, mayonnaise and
(39:43):
salsa so um. In China, Jamaica and I believe Thailand
they like to put ketchup on fried chicken. I gotta
try that one. What about pizza, uh, Eastern Eastern Europe apparently,
(40:04):
and Trinidad, India, Japan, in Poland. That's how you know
it's good man. That is a diverse collection of countries
that all put ketchup on their pizza. You know what's
funny is my friend Eddie, I can say all of
these foods ranch dressing. Well, yeah, I mean ranch stressing
should be the number one condiment in the world. Chuck,
(40:25):
hold on, I have to tell you something. You have
to go to Japan one in these days. Right there
are over there they Oh, I thought it was just
understood you have a standing invitation to come to Japan
every time we got because you are the ambassador. All right,
I got the sash and everything, But Japan's misspelled. Um,
it's a They have pizza over there and rather than
(40:48):
tomato sauce. It's gonna knock your socks off. They use
that Japanese mayo what with corn and sometimes ham like
pan chetta or something like that. Right, So you've got
a dough, then you've got a spread of mayonnaise, corn
off the cob and ham. Yes, and it is mind
(41:11):
blowingly good. Is there cheese? I don't remember if there's no.
They're not big on They're not big on cheese or dairy.
They don't have that much room for cows. All the
all the cows they have are like Kobe beef cows.
I think that's what they kind of dedicate their cow
space too. Did ever tell you my story of being
at the Chinese restaurant when I was a kid? Uh?
(41:34):
There was a guy getting take out and uh, he
went through about uh probably about five or six different things,
asking if it had cheese on it, like egg rolds
have cheese on it? Uh, Google, guy pants have cheese
on it? And that the sweet Chinese owner is kind
of an older guy kept saying like no, no, no, no.
And at the very after like the fifth thing, the
(41:56):
guys stopped them and said, uh, and it's very sweet
Chinese American accent that no Chinese food has cheese on it.
Really was the guy just messing with him or something? No, man,
I think, I don't know. I guess he was just unfamiliar.
I mean, this was the nineteen seventies, so uh maybe
he you know, didn't have experience with Chinese food. But
(42:16):
it's funny as an adult to think about, like melted
on Yeah, that's got white American. Uh so Sweden, if
you go to Sweden, they will actually squeeze catch up
over their pasta. That's like, um, honey boo boo. Really yeah,
(42:39):
they used to put and I never really watched this show,
but I mean I was a conscious human being back then,
so I was aware of this. But they would they
would cook pasta and then put butter on it and
then squeeze catch up on him. That was like honey
boo boo spaghetti. Oh my god, no comment. We used
to be colleagues of honey boo boos at one point.
(43:01):
Did they work for Discovery? Yeah, they were all on TLC.
I have to rumor to put at that back to
my resume. Um where where else? What else we got?
What kind of crazy catchups do we have? Okay? So um,
all right, you ready for this one? This is I've
never heard of this before in Canada. Have you ever
(43:23):
had while you wouldn't have, but have you ever seen
ketchup potato chips. Uh, yes, they're pretty good. They're better
than barbecue chips if you ask me. Hairs makes a
good one, right. Apparently the Canadians do some wacky thing
with it where they take can they take ketchup potato
chips and turn it into a catchup cake of some sort.
(43:45):
I've not had this before, but we're gonna be in
Toronto and Vancouver this year, so I express multiple catch
up cakes. But no, really, you don't really have to
make this catch up I should point out to since
we're talking about that tour that uh, Toronto and Vancouver
are far and away leading in ticket sales right now
out of the gate. So Canada, like America, needs to
(44:08):
step it up because Canada is kicking your butts man.
That's the great thing about doing um multinational tours as
you can put one country against the other. Yeah right, yeah,
especially as everybody's kind of devolving into nationalism right now,
you can really get it coming. Uh. You know what
kind of chips that did have the other day was
the the what do you call it? The country gravy
(44:29):
sausage and country gravy las. Yeah. I haven't tried those.
Are they good? Um? Yeah, I mean do you like
white gravy sausage gravy? Sure it tastes like that. Really,
they nailed it. They nailed it, because sometimes those things
are way off. Well, yeah, they have a contest, now,
don't they. Yeah, yeah they do. I'm trying to remember
some of the other ones because they've they've had some
(44:50):
good ones. But um, oh, chicken and waffles. Chicken and
waffles one was really good, was it? Yeah? It had
like just this hint of maple and but yeah, I
kind of tasted a little fried chickenie. It was. It
was good. Um what other kinds of crazy catchups do
we have? What about catch up ice cream? No? Thank you?
(45:13):
So Baskin Robbins apparently came up with it and it
died in the lab. But apparently it was based on
a Hinz ice cream recipe for Hinz carnival cream. So
that was the thing, which I mean again, I would
try this stuff. Did I ever tell you about the
time you and I went to Plaza Fiesta and tried
tuna gelato and it was like it tasted just like
(45:37):
raw tuna. It was insane. Never heard of it before
and never seen it anywhere else. It was like this
one specific place. Had itf youre Ever, if you ever
find yourself in Atlanta, Georgia, was some time to kill,
go to Plaza Fiesta, try to find the gelato place
and see if they have the tuna gelato. They have
a good uh cowboys store over there too. Yeah, they
(45:58):
have a bunch of them, like good good boots, hats
and shirt belts and checkered shirts and brother, if you're
throwing a keen signea, that's where you go. Yeah, I'm
sure so. Lastly, Chuck, we have to give a shout out.
We would be really remiss if we didn't mention that
one of tomato is a or catchup is a big
(46:20):
ingredient in something called pruno. Yeah, we talked about prison
wine in our Prisons episode. I did not. I don't
think I remembered that that was. In fact, maybe I
didn't know. Did we say that it was an ingredient.
I don't think so. I didn't notice it until now.
But it's like part of the It's like you use
(46:41):
that in sugar packets to feed the fermentation process in
a sock. Right. Uh. I don't know if you could
make an ass like I think it needs to be
a little more air type than that, but maybe not.
Maybe you could, although it all just drip out. I'm
not sure, man man for the resp I came across,
(47:02):
it's like in a like a big gallon sized zip
block bag. But yeah, after like they two or three fermentation,
you feed it with ketchup packets and sugar gross. Yeah,
and then you got some pruno, which you should never try.
You got anything else? Yeah, we should cover this thing,
this last thing you sent headline Israel ketchup war forces
(47:23):
Hines to relabel sauce as tomato seasoning. So in Israel,
the leading ketchup maker is uh O s E M
O S M. And they have a sixty six percent
market share. And uh in Israel, as in most countries,
they have food standards where you can only call something
something if it has this much of whatever. And apparently
(47:45):
Israel's standards are much higher than the US or Europe's. Yeah,
so you have to have a certain percentage of tomato
concentrate to be labeled tomato ketchup in Israel. And so
oh Sim even though they have six mark or sixty
six percent market share, went after Hines. They said, hey,
we did a study with an independent lab, it had
(48:09):
no skin in the game, leading European external laboratory, and
they found out that Hines did not have the required
percentage of tomato concentrate. So they can't even call it
ketchup anymore. And I believe it's being enforced over there, right. Yeah,
Well this was from two fifteen, and the thing leaves
off I didn't see any updates, but the article leaves
(48:31):
off that Hines was petitioning with the Health ministry to
change the tomato concentrate requirements down to something like six. Well,
here's the thing is, Hines said their claims have no substance. Well,
then why are they lobbying to get the percentage lowered? Right?
And I think what happened was Hines was selling the
(48:54):
same catchup that they sell in Europe and America. And
this is just speculation on my part, but they were
probably selling the same ketchup that they sell elsewhere but
in Israel. But Israel has higher food standards at least
as far as their ketchup goes, and their competitor nail
them on it. That's what I think happened. But yeah,
(49:14):
they can't on the label that they can call it
ketch up. In English, but they can't call it ketchup
in in Hebrew, they can only call it a seasoning
malk ah. It's pretty funny, it is. It's a funny world.
Chuck it and now ketchup is done. I guess I
didn't think it would take us in our nine hundreds
(49:37):
something episode to finally get to ketchup, but we did well,
and this now freeze up. Now I have permission to
request mayonnaise. Okay, that's a deal, we'll do that all right.
Maybe we should just have condiment month. Okay, I like
the sound of that. Well. In the meantime, if you
(49:57):
want to learn more about ketchup, you can type that
in the search bar how stuff works dot com. You
can also check out that geo's articles on it. Like
I said, fast Code Design, Mental Flaws had a great one,
and we got some stuff from our friends at list
Verse who had a pretty interesting compilation of some cool
tomato facts or catch up facts. And since I said
(50:21):
tomato instead of catch up, it's time for listener mail,
I'm gonna call this wow signal update. Um, did you
get tweets about this? It didn't ignore them all? Because
I think this is a lie. Oh, all right, Well,
so I think it's propaganda. Here we go. Then, Hey, guys, first,
want to let you know that I love the show.
I always look forward to new episodes Tuesday Thursday, as
(50:43):
well as the selects on Saturday. I know you would
be interested to find out that I saw news article
the other day that states that an experiment was ran
earlier this year based on a paper from the claimed
the Wow signal was caused by hydrogen clouds from comments
which transisted, uh, transisted, transited that area of the sky
(51:07):
back in nine seven. In January this year, those comments
transited once again and it was determined they were indeed
the source of the signal. Of course, this sparked quite
a bit of controversy among those hoping that this was
a sign of alien life. But the last it appears
that wasn't. So I can't help but be a little disappointed.
Ever since learning of the Wild signal, I knew it
was a long shot. Anyway, keep up great work. I
(51:29):
love to see you in Charleston, South Carolina someday. I'm
sure you'd love that city. And Sean Flanagan, I do
love Charleston. Yeah, Charleston is a top notch Town. Yeah,
I don't know if that's has enough people for us
to go, but maybe I don't know. People might come
from around the southeast to that show. Who knows that
(51:50):
Heckley went to Birmingham. Lets go to Charleston. Yeah, it's
I mean us playing there is a good enough reason
to get people to go to Charleston. Maybe Bill Murray
would come. Oh yeah, is he still there? And know
his family is Yeah, he lives there. Okay, I mean
he's I think he's got more than one place, but
I think he Well, I'll tell you what, if you're listening,
(52:10):
we'll list you for our show if you'll come. He's
just crazy enough to show up. Yeah. So that's from
Sean and uh we had a lot of people right
in about the Wild Signal. So yeah, disappointing that everybody
bought into it, like, oh no, it's not Aliens, it's
this hydrogen cloud. Stupid comments. Well, if you want to
(52:32):
get in touch with us, you can tweet to us
or at s y s K podcast that I'm at,
Josh Underscore, um Underscore Clark. You can hang out with
Chuck on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant or at
Stuff you Should Know. You can send us all an
email to Stuff podcast at how Stuffworks dot com and
has always joined us at our home on the web.
(52:52):
Stuff you Should Know dot com For more on this
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