Curmudgeon's Corner
Recently we were having lunch out here in Mexico, and admiring the process as the waiter
prepared fresh salsa in a molcajete at our table. He commented that
most gringos prefer ketchup (catsup), which he called American sauce. It
started me thinking about my long relationship with, and love for, ketchup.
According to a story in National Geographic, ketchup comes from
the Hokkien Chinese word, kê-tsiap, the name of a sauce derived from fermented fish.
It is believed that traders brought fish sauce from Vietnam to
southeastern China. The British likely encountered ketchup in Southeast
Asia, returned home, and tried to replicate the fermented dark sauce. They must
have taken a left at Albuquerque, though, and ended up with HP Sauce.
Ketchup was for me, like maybe a lot of kids, a way of making something not so palatable at least marginally more so. A classic example is liver & onions, which my dad loved though no one else did. Another is “roast beef”, which in my growing up meant gray and tasteless meat. But the pinnacle of ketchup’s power as a cuisine converter (redeemer?) was achieved in making my mom’s salmon croquettes edible enough that I did not get in trouble for not eating them. Sorry, mom. Redemption Sauce. Sorry Robert Nesta Marley!
When I was 9 years old, between 3rd and 4th grade, I had baseball practice most summer evenings. The practice field was a 4-5 block walk from home. It was on these walks hone that I collected pop bottles, which I redeemed (more redemption!) to have money for Mad magazine. I played for the Lafayette Ravens in Oklahoma City, south of the North Canadian River. The affluent lived to the north of the river. Interestingly, a city improvement effort in 2004 dammed up the usually low and slow-flowing North Canadian to create the “Oklahoma River”, which includes an Olympic-level rowing and training center. I cannot imagine rowing in the Oklahoma wind. Oil money can do surprising things.
But I digress. Baseball figures into this because my parents would
often go out looking at real estate in the summer evenings. It was I guess
cheap entertainment. They looked for years before we finally moved from SW 47th
to SW 97th. This all meant that I generally came home at dusk to an empty
house, with my dinner on a melamine plate, covered with foil in the massive O’Keefe
& Merritt stove (it probably weighed 300 lbs.) It had a warming area with
very low heat where I would find my dinner.
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| Not my mom's croquettes! |
Salmon croquettes were in the bi-weekly rotation. They were made
with canned salmon. The can looked a lot like this one, except it did not
reference “natural”, “Omega-3’s”, or “wild-caught”. I am not even sure it said
Alaska. A feature of that canned salmon is that it retains the bones, which are
pressure cooked and thus soft. This includes vertebrae. When I winced, my mom would
say, “there is a lot of calcium in those bones, they are good for you!” She was
not wrong but eating a fish backbone was icky.
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| A leading source of calcium! |
A final comment about the Lafayette Ravens. Lafayette was the
grade school both I and my older brother Dan attended. It had an auditorium
which at the time seemed cavernous, though I am sure if I saw it today, I would
marvel at how tiny it was. On the right of the stage was a large portrait of
George Washington, on the left, a similar portrait of Marquis de Lafayette. I
was tickled when Lafayette had a starring role in the musical, Hamilton. The Ravens were 3rd and 4th
graders, and we had a particularly good team that year, no thanks to me. I was average at best, and inexplicably played shortstop,
which is usually a skill position. It may have been tied to my inability to track down fly balls. Our success was due mostly to 3 players, a
pitcher named Steve (the coach’s son), and two brothers, a year apart, Randy
and Terry. As was always my experience playing sports as a young person, there
were always a few guys who were just not only better skill-wise, but kind of
physically precocious. This does not include the guy in 9th grade football who
was actually about 16, having flunked or “been held back” a couple of years in
a row.
Anyway, that year we won almost all our games (maybe we did win
them all) and in the course of the season-ending tournaments, accrued something
like 5 trophies. For me, it was kind of like being the equipment manager for a
Super Bowl team, you still get a ring. The irony was that same year, my
aforementioned brother, a far superior athlete to me, played catcher for the
Southside Cobras. They won big as well, but he ended up with a single trophy that
was smaller than any of my 5. He did not hesitate to point out how ridiculous
it all was.
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| Dubiously acquired hardware? |
Written April; Published 2021, June (sigh)
