Redemption Sauce

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 3^rd and 4^th 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 47^th to SW 97^th. 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.

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.

A leading source of calcium!

Enter ketchup. With enough catsup, the croquettes became manageable. The brand we had was Brooks Catsup. We never sprang for Heinz (I have a similar story about Zesta vs. Premium saltine crackers), which I knew was better since a neighbor had it and I had tried it. There was a Heinz TV ad back then that showed two paper towels with a dollop of Heinz on one and the “other leading brand” (Hunt’s) on the other. As you might expect, the #2 band seeped water out into the towel, while the Heinz remained steadfast, a sign of its superiority. This is no doubt due to viscosity enhancers and coagulants in the Heinz, but no matter. Heinz is still king, with a 60% share in the US and 82% in the UK.

In looking for a picture of the Brooks bottle I remembered from being a kid, I discovered to my delight that along Route 66, The Brooks Catsup Bottle water tower, south of Collinsville, IL, constructed in 1949. It is trademarked "The World's Largest Catsup Bottle". Much cooler than the catsup itself ever was. We will be driving Route 66 from Chicago to LA soon, and will be looking for it.

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 3^rd and 4^th 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.

Dubiously acquired hardware?

So from molcajete and salsa to ketchup, salmon croquettes, and Little League baseball. I have read one’s memory of the past gets sharper with age, even as the more recent memories are less sharp. Who knows? Or…maybe it’s just because baseball season started again. And like the motto on our Old Guy Softball League shirts - “The older I get, the better I was”. So true.

                                                                                                 Written April; Published 2021, June (sigh)