Book Review: The Heinz Tomato Ketchup Cookbook
Tanya A. Brown

Sometimes when my husband is in the right mood, he'll wax nostalgic about his first job as a dishwasher at a small town motel restaurant. Only 15 at the time, he had to haul out of bed at five a.m. each morning to make his date with the industrial dishwasher and giant pots caked in burned cream gravy.

The restaurant's cook, an irritable character, was prone to yelling and waving his meat cleaver if customers ordered pancakes just before closing time. He must have had a soft spot for my husband, though: he'd frequently make him a burger and a big plate of fries. Those fries were the highlight of my husband's day. He'd douse them in virtually an entire bottle of ketchup. (Heinz, of course, carefully refilled from a can by the waitresses.) They'd be immersed in a red lake so deep that he'd have to retrieve them with a fork. Their sweet/salty flavor is engraved on his brain to this day, forever associated with happy memories of coming of age and saving up money to buy a stereo.

Ketchup, the ubiquitous American condiment, accompanies happy memories for many of us. Children are introduced to it almost from infancy, when they're taken to fast food joints or eat hot dogs at ball games. Ketchup often drenches the Sunday morning breakfast eggs or appears in the Wednesday night meatloaf. Its flavor is familiar and comforting, subconsciously associated with good times.

Ketchup isn't only used as a condiment, though. It has long been a fixture in the home kitchen, pinch-hitting when a tomatoey note is desired and the cook doesn't want to reach for a can of sauce and a can opener. According to the Heinz Tomato Ketchup Cookbook, 97% of American households have a bottle of ketchup. It's safe to bet that most of those bottles have the familiar keystone logo on them! Now the Heinz Tomato Ketchup Cookbook has formalized that relationship with its affectionate and nostalgic collection of 40 ketchup-based recipes, fun facts, and vintage advertising.

What? No ketchup ice cream?
Authored by Paul Hartley, a British chef and veteran cookbook author, the book carefully avoids the novelty cookbook custom of including a few blatantly awful recipes. This is either a relief or a serious disappointment, depending on your view of such things.

For example, there are no desserts including ketchup, and the author refrains from the temptation to mix ketchup and cream together and call it a soup. Similarly, although Heinz ketchup is the key ingredient in the recipes, Hartley doesn't require that a gallon of it be used in each dish. Instead, he has worked with relative restraint, using the ketchup to add a hint of color or zest to mainstream dishes. The results are credible, if at times a bit contrived: it's hard to imagine how the Pork and Apple Meatloaf will benefit from the addition of ketchup, but at least it only uses two tablespoons.

Sometimes the author's British roots reveal themselves, as with the recipe for Bangers and Mash. That is balanced out by recipes such as Huevos Flamenca, an egg dish which gives a nod of recognition to the fondness some Americans have for drowning eggs in ketchup.

"Mommy, make the tomato man stop looking at me!"
Despite the fact that the book is ostensibly a cookbook, recipes are only one facet of its content. Pop culture and graphic design aficionados will surely enjoy the vintage advertising which is sprinkled throughout the book, one of which includes the myopic and sinister tomato mascot shown at right.

A lineup of bottles throughout the years reveals that the familiar keystone label shape has been existence since the 1870s, and that the well-known glass ketchup bottle and logo have been essentially unchanged since 1944. In a world where a different anthropomorphic animal is born every five nanoseconds to flog cereal, this is no small thing. No less a person than Andy Warhol recognized the Heinz ketchup bottle's classic status: it is a cultural icon which transcends updating.

The ketchup with a speed limit
In addition to items of visual interest, the book is peppered with fascinating history and factoids, such as this:

"The world's largest ketchup bottle: Collinsville, Illinois, built in 1949 on top of a water tower and standing 170 feet tall."

(Alas, the book doesn't have a photo of the tower, perhaps because it isn't a Heinz bottle. However, if you'd like to see it, you can do so here.)

We also learn that

"Heinz tomato ketchup has a speed limit: if it pours unaided at more than .028 MPH, it's rejected."

The speed limit is, of course, a reference to the ketchup's high viscosity or thickness. Although the book doesn't delve into this fact, ketchup's viscosity actually changes when it's stirred or shaken, a quality known as thixotropy. According to one source, "once ketchup begins to flow, it picks up speed," leading to the classic mishap of shaking the bottle in frustration, then having mountains of ketchup erupt out of the bottle and onto one's favorite shirt.

Food and pop culture collide
In looking at the book, it's interesting to reflect on the history of brand-based cookbooks. While cookbooks touting particular products have been around forever (or so it seems), this book reflects a current aesthetic that values the symbolism, history and cultural impact at least as much as the inherent quality of the food. It demonstrates an appreciation of the inherent humor of vintage advertising and the iconic status of Heinz tomato ketchup. That is very much an attitude of the present day, and not the way a ketchup cookbook would have been written 60 years ago.

In 1945 or 1955, a Heinz Ketchup cookbook would have been produced by Heinz Ketchup Labs (or a similarly-named organization). It would have been sent to apron-clad housewives who'd mailed in a quarter and a self-addressed stamped envelope to a P.O. box. It would have unblushingly recommended the use of as much Heinz ketchup as possible (don't accept inferior substitutes!). By and large, people would have taken the recipes at face value and would have made them without a sense of irony.

A ketchup cookbook from an earlier era certainly wouldn't have been beautifully designed with witty visual references to the product and product packaging, nor would it have had the same content as today's cookbook or have been sold in mainstream bookstores. Readers would have been puzzled if it had included factoids relating to the ketchup's status in pop culture.

Today's readers expect the focus to be on the culture and not the food, and for them, the Heinz Tomato Ketchup Cookbook won't disappoint.

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