Pure Ketchup: A History of America's National Condiment With Recipes [Hardcover]

Andrew F. Smith (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 9, 1996

For topping French fries or cottage cheese, K rations or school lunches, ketchup has long been an American favorite. In Pure Ketchup, Andrew F. Smith chronicles American milestones in ketchup history, including colonial adaptations of popular British mushrooms, anchovy, and walnut ketchups, the rise of tomato-based ketchup, the proliferation of commercial bottling after the Civil War, debates over preservatives, the resurgence of homemade and designer varieties, and a recent challenge from salsa. He also includes 110 historical recipes.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The marriage of food and pop culture has one of its better moments in Pure Ketchup by Andrew F. Smith. This history proves that a book larded with hundreds of footnotes can captivate. Smith's writing is lucid and clips along briskly from one astonishing fact to the next. Did you know that ketchup was so much the rage by the early 19th century that Lord Byron, Jane Austin and Charles Dickens all mention it in their work? Or that in 1915 over 800 brands of ketchup were sold in the state of Connecticut alone? Smith elucidates the cloudy origins of both the word ("ketchup" "catchup" "catsup") and the condiment. He documents the evolution of its commercial production in America. Enormous demand for ketchup and other tomato products, he explains, fueled the movement to rid it of adulterants and preservatives and was key to passage of the Pure Food and Drugs Bill in 1906. The 50 recipes Smith includes are all historical. Same may tempt you to try your hand despite their primitive instructions.

Review

"Smith remains unabashedly evangelical about the much-loved and much-maligned sauce." -- LA Times Magazine, June 10, 2001 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press; First Edition edition (September 9, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1570031398
• ISBN-13: 978-1570031397
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,212,543 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I am a freelance writer and speaker on culinary matters. I teach culinary history and professional food writing at the New School in Manhattan, serve as the General Editor of the Food Series at the University of Illinois Press, and am the general editor for the Edible Series at Reaktion Press in the United Kingdom. I am also the editor-in-chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia on Food and Drink in America and the Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink.

I am a member of the Culinary Historians of New York, the Association for the Study of Food Society (ASFS), and the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP). I serve on the editorial board for the ASFS journal, Food, Culture and Society and is the Chairman of The Culinary Trust, the philanthropic arm of IACP.

I have delivered more than fifteen hundred presentations on various educational, historical, and international topics, and has organized seventy-three major conferences. I have been frequently interviewed by and quoted in newspapers, journals and magazines, such as the New York Times, New Yorker, Reader's Digest, Los Angeles Times, Atlanta Constitution, Chicago Tribune, Fortune Magazine and The Wall Street Journal. I have been regularly interviewed on radio and television, including National Public Radio and the Food Network. I have served as historical consultant to several television series and appeared in episodes of: the 'Food Essence,' developed by Charles Bishop Productions, Halifax, Canada; 'American Eats' and 'America Drinks,' documentaries regularly broadcast on the History Channel and A&E; 'A Century of Food,' produced by Greystone Communications, Inc., broadcast on the Food Network in January 2001; 'Follow that Food,' series by Gordon Elliot, broadcast on the Food Network; 'What We Eat,' hosted by Burt Wolf and produced by Acorn Productions, currently airing on PBS; 'Ever Wondered about Food' by the BBC; the Food Network's 'Top Five;' Burt Wolf's PBS program on 'Thanksgiving;' Tom Zapeicki's (WBGU) 'Ketchup: King of Condiments' on PBS; Meals in 1776, 1876 and the 1950s, Steve Gillion's History Center's program, 'Eating through American History,' which aired on May 21, 2006 on the History Channel; and Atlas Media's American Eats episodes on 'Salty Snacks,' 'Condiments,' 'Cookies,' 'Chocolate,' 'Canning,' 'Soft Drinks,' 'Holiday Food,' and 'Presidential Food,' which were released on History Channel during the Summer and Fall 2006.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Say, can I get some fries with the ketchup?, August 24, 2002

By 

Joseph Haschka (Glendale, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: PURE KETCHUP PB (Paperback)

According to some arcane device called the Bostwick Consistometer ("Oh, honey, what happened to that old Bostwick we used to have in the attic?"), ketchup "cannot flow faster than fourteen centimeters in thirty seconds at twenty degrees centigrade". Author Andrew Smith, while citing this fact in PURE KETCHUP, fails to say if this is on a downhill slope or level straightaway. I guess I'll have to conduct my own experiments.

This book is otherwise a fascinating and fact filled history of the condiment that only an un-American subversive would fail to gobble up with fries. Starting with the origin of the word - "kecap" (Indonesia), "kê-tsiap" (Vietnam?), "escaveche" (France), "iskebêy" (Arab) - Smith describes the evolution of ketchup, or catchup, or catsup, from the old days in Europe, when it was made from everything imaginable (grapes, cucumbers, walnuts, oysters, cherries, mushrooms, apples, apricots, gooseberries, currants, anchovies, cranberries), to the present, when it's a distinctly American food made from tomatoes.

In the chapter on the growth of the U.S. ketchup industry in the nineteenth century, the author goes to extreme lengths to name seemingly all the manufacturers of the period and every brand name they marketed. Smith followed the same course in his book on popcorn, POPPED CULTURE. I continue to regard his commendable attention to such detail excessive, but I shan't dwell on it here because I liked PURE KETCHUP more than the other anyway. The best chapter, for me, was the lengthiest one, which describes the bitter battle between pure-food adherents advocating the manufacture of ketchup without preservatives and those espousing the use of such, specifically benzoates. The two camps flailed away at each other for years to the point that even the eventual victor staggered away exhausted. The story of this acrimony might just as well illustrate the course of any debate over food additives or processing, whether it's MSG, aspartame, food irradiation, or the looming conflict over the fat and calorie content of fast foods. As for me, I'm perfectly happy to find the ketchup with the highest content of preservatives, pour it on the biggest order of fries I can buy, and thumb my nose at the Nutrition Gestapo while I chow down.

For me, perhaps the major fault of PURE KETCHUP is that it failed to mention, much less define, the place of barbecue and steak sauces in the genealogy of ketchup, if indeed they're related. I was in the supermarket today, and the brands of barbecue sauce far outnumber those of ketchup, and the labels of all I checked included a tomato derivative. So, what about those Andy? (Since Smith and I exchanged friendly emails concerning POPPED CULTURE, perhaps he'll read this and enlighten me.)

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Ketchup and history, July 31, 2006

By 

K. Salmon "salmon_of_the_wicca" (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Pure Ketchup: A History of America's National Condiment With Recipes (Hardcover)

A good and well researched book with what I needed, a few recipies for non-tomato catchup that I can use to awe my friends in our frequent potlucks. I think grape and walnut katchuip will start my experimentations.