Tag Archives: condiments

Cooking with Ketchup: Pictures from the Promotional Kitchen

By Jennifer McGillan

In 1957 H.J. Heinz and Co published 57 Prize Winning Recipes, a promotional single-product cookbook. As a historical document, it is a snapshot of the late 1950s American culinary landscape, offering insight into the ongoing evolution and diversification of the American palate in the mid-twentieth century. It also documents the tension generated as part of that diversification: throughout the cookbook recipes reflecting consumer familiarity and interest in dishes from culinary traditions that were previously “foreign,” such as Mexican, Chinese, and Italian food, are paired with illustrations that mock those same cultures and traditions. 

The front cover of the cookbook, 57 Prize-Winning Recipes from H. J. Heinz, Co.

57 Prize Winning Recipes aimed to put ketchup at the forefront of the cooking and eating experience, inviting cooks to reconsider its applications in the kitchen, and asking prospective diners to consider the reality of ketchup – its taste and texture  – writ large. The primary purpose of the cookbook is to sell Heinz ketchup to the public. As such, the recipes presented in the cookbook are intended for home cooks. They reflect prevailing cultural norms and trends, offer cooks alternatives to familiar standards, and celebrate culinary innovation, though using a limited palette, and for a very specific palate. 

As a home cook with an interest in vintage food, reading this cookbook is a wild ride. The recipes themselves are both intriguing and repulsive and  the illustrations are simultaneously lurid, offensive, and quaint. Like many vintage cookbooks, it invites a number of questions including: Who made this cookbook? Why? Were they serious or was it just a publicity stunt? Are any of these recipes any good?

About the cookbook

57 Prize Winning Recipes is a slender volume of only 32 pages, printed in color on clay (magazine) paper, bound with staples. This paper, which fuses to itself when it gets wet, is the greatest material challenge of working with the cookbook, as I discovered while cooking with my personal copy. As I carefully pulled the pages apart and patted them dry, I started to wonder: was this cookbook created to be seen, read, and talked about, but never used? Or was the paper a mistake made by people who sold food but didn’t cook?

There is no surviving documentation on creation and development of the cookbook in the H.J. Heinz Company records, but based on newspaper accounts, the recipes are most likely the result of two contests: one held in 1955, in which contestants submitted their own recipes, and one held in 1956, in which contestants submitted names for recipes created by Heinz. Unlike other cookbooks resulting from recipe contests, such as the Pillsbury Bake-off, the winners’ names are not attached to the recipes. Finding the names and stories of the contest winners for 57 Recipes is also part of my research on the cookbook.

Visually and stylistically, the cookbook is an overwhelming mish-mash, in which whimsical line drawings done in primary colors illustrating recipes mix with full color photographs of dishes that verge on garish and nauseating. (Our cataloger mostly-jokingly threatened to go on strike after she cataloged the library’s copy.)

In addition to the illustrations of the recipes themselves, the art in the cookbook reflects a tension between a progressive, internationally-flavored future, and a conservative, xenophobic present, communicating complicated messages of  acceptance and mockery in the same space. For example, the first illustration in the cookbook is a drawing of a chef with a tomato face on a human body, wearing a monocle and carrying a magic wand, evoking a classy, transformative, future-positive vibe. 

Meanwhile, only a few pages later, the illustrations for the Mexican and Chinese dishes are accompanied by a shrimp in a sombrero playing the ukulele, a shrimp with a Mandarin hat and a Fu Manchu mustache, and eggs with slanted eyes wearing Asian conical hats. While these images communicated clear racial stereotypes, not all of the images included in the cookbook function in the same way. Some of the illustrations employ imagery that is evocative of a country or culture using different visual forms.  The illustration for Chicken Cacciatore, for example, (p. 9) is a chicken playing a guitar on a gondolier and Texas Hot Eggs are accompanied by an egg dressed like a cowboy and wielding a whip (p. 15). When  read alongside one another, the racist and xenophobic illustrations provided for the other recipes are thus even more stark and jarring

Alongside the drawings are photographs of the dishes in full, saturated color. They are so vivid you can almost taste the ketchup, and there is a lot of ketchup. They are the least appetizing part of the whole publication. As part of my research, I cooked and photographed (and also ate) some of the dishes, to show what they looked like in a real-life, non-promotional context. 

The proof is in the crabcake

Reading and cooking from vintage recipes can be much like reading ancient poems and legends: a voyage of hope and occasionally perilous textual uncertainty that sometimes sends in joy.

In the case of 57 Recipes,  the recipes are cookable, and in some cases, delicious. Crab Biscayne (p. 11), with some minor alterations,  is now a regular part of my Thanksgiving and Christmas menus. I tried making it with tomato sauce and it is actually better with ketchup. The Spicy Pear Compote was also really good.

 I was selective with the dishes I chose to prepare, in order to avoid gratuitously wasting food. I chose dishes that I thought I could share, or that were easily cut down for one person. As my research on the contest winners progressed, I also focused on cooking recipes created by identifiable individuals.

Cooking with ketchup was paradoxically freeing. I was not expecting the results to be good, so I didn’t put any expectations on myself or my cooking skills. Techniques I learned in the process include: how to use a double boiler and the broiler, and how to bake a cake from scratch. Some tastes and textures were odd, but there was only one dish – Eggs Ample – where the ketchup turned out to be Too Much. 

Some examples:

Toledo Ham (uncooked): Overall 1st Prize Winner, 1955 Cook with Ketchup contest; original recipe by Marguerite Fortress of Toledo, OH.
Toledo Ham (uncooked): Overall 1st Prize Winner, 1955 Cook with Ketchup contest; original recipe by Marguerite Fortress of Toledo, OH.
Toledo Ham (cooked).
Spicy Pear Compote. Original author as yet unknown. 
Brazilian Dreams: Original author unknown; a personal “pizza” with ketchup and macademia nuts
Major League Rhubarb (uncooked): Overall 2nd Prize 1955 Cook with Ketchup contest; original recipe by Rosemary Rothschild of New York, NY.
Major League Rhubard (cooked).
Shrimp sandwich: Original author unknown.
Crab Biscayne (uncooked): Original author unknown.
Crab Biscayne (cooked).
Eggs Ample: 1st place in Eggs; original recipe by Evelyn Rose Peterson of Washington, DC. Contains eggs, mashed potatoes, ketchup and grated cheese.

Jennifer McGillan has been the Coordinator  of Manuscripts at Mississippi State University since 2015. She holds a BA in English from Davidson College (1997), a MLIS-Archives from the University of Pittsburgh (2003) and a JD from New York Law School (2012). Her research interests include 19th century legal history and enslaved persons, vintage cooking and recipes, “women’s work,” the various intersections of archives work and disability, and pirates.

Colonizing Condiments: A (Very) Short History of Ketchup

Ketchup.  Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Ketchup. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

ByAmanda E. Herbert

Today we imagine ketchup as the ultimate modern American food (and it is true that we like to put ketchup on…well, a lot of things).  But ketchup’s origins are found in Asia, and its adaptation into the thing that resembles our thick, modern-day ketchup began in early modern Britain.

The word “ketchup” is borrowed either from the Chinese language (kôe-chiap, a brine of pickled fish or shellfish, with “kôe” as a kind of fish, and “chiap” as juice or sauce), and/or from Malay (with “kecap” or “kicap,” soy sauce).  It’s likely that Britons encountered this tasty sauce – a thin, black-brown liquid that was either a type of fish sauce or a type of soy sauce – during acts of travel and colonization. 

Ketchup (which early modern Britons spelled a lot of different ways: ketchup, katchup, ketchop, katchop, kitchup, ketsup, catchup, cachup, catchop, and even catshup) began to appear in British texts at the end of the seventeenth century.[1] These were sometimes travelogues and books about colonization, with a description of the sauce – and how good it tasted – but without any instructions on how to make it.  When ketchup did start to show up in recipe books, it was often listed as an ingredient, but again, without providing readers with a guide on how to produce it themselves.  This might mean that the recipe book authors trusted that their readers would be able to purchase ready-made, imported ketchup. 

Eighteenth-century ketchup bottle. Blue glass and gilt cruet bottle and stopper, ca. 1790-ca. 1800, 117&A-1907, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Eighteenth-century ketchup bottle. Blue glass and gilt cruet bottle and stopper, ca. 1790-ca. 1800, 117&A-1907, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Thanks to Angela McShane for this reference.

But ketchup was either so popular, so hard to get, or so expensive, that early modern British people soon started trying to make their own.  Evidence for these early ketchup experiments can be found in manuscript recipe books from the period.  In their quest to replicate the umami flavor found in soy- or fish-based Chinese or Malay sauces, Britons turned to a variety of ingredients: mushrooms, anchovies, oysters, walnuts, and even horseradish.  One 1693 recipe for “Cucumber Catchup” called for cooks to “put a handful of scraped horseradish” to “every quart of the Liquor” in the dish.[2] 

Like that cucumber ketchup, most early modern British ketchups were heavily flavored, seasoned, and spiced.  Mrs. Marshall’s “white Catchup,” found in Jane Staveley’s 1693/4 handwritten recipe book, called for “a pound of shallots…a quart of Madira, a quarter of an Ounce of Mace, [and] a quarter of an Ounce of whole white pepper.”  Staveley – or someone in her household – clearly liked ketchups, because her book also contained receipts for oyster ketchup, made with lemon peel, a quarter of an ounce of mace, a quarter of an ounce of cloves, and one sliced nutmeg.[3] Spices were also added to a recipe “to make catchup of Wallnut [from] Mrs Richmond” which is found in an anonymous recipe book from c. 1720.  This recipe author included a quarter of an ounce of mace, a quarter of an ounce of cloves, a quarter of an ounce of nutmeg, and a little bit of pepper to their ketchup, which was supposed to be cooked until “it’s the Couler of Clarett.”  Another recipe in the same anonymous book claimed that ketchup could be made spicy by using Dianthus caryophyllus, the clove gillyflower – also known as the clove carnation – as a base.  This Carnation Ketchup called for the “top of three clove gilly flowers” along with one nutmeg, half an ounce of cloves, half an ounce of mace, half an ounce of cinnamon, and one shallot.  This combination of botanicals created a mixture so potent, the author warned, that “a little of this goes a great way.”[4]

Longevity was another important factor.  One of Mrs. Knight’s 1740 recipes for ketchup was entitled “to make catchup to keep 20 years.”  This effect was apparently achieved by using “strong stale bear [beer]…the stronger and staler the bear [beer] the better.”[5]

"To make White Catchup." Jane Staveley, Receipt book of Jane Staveley, 1693-1694, V.a.401, Folger Shakespeare Library.
“To make White Catchup.” Detail from Jane Staveley, Receipt book of Jane Staveley, 1693-1694, V.a.401, Folger Shakespeare Library.

Flavor, spice, and shelf-life were clearly important to early modern British ketchup-makers as they attempted to replicate the soy and fish sauces that had come to them via acts of travel, conquest, and colonization.  But just as these Britons worked to use and enjoy Chinese and/or Malay sauces, they simultaneously adapted them, changing the recipes to suit their own tastes, needs, expectations, and palates.

Recent works by scholars of early America and the Atlantic world have traced how white Europeans appropriated, gleaned, bought, and stole knowledge and knowledge-systems from indigenous Americans and enslaved people of African descent in acts of colonization; two Recipes Project posts by Claire Gherini describe these acts via cures for poison. These frameworks can be exceptionally useful for anyone analyzing culinary adaptations made by British recipe authors.  Jane Staveley explained to her friends and family members that, if “you wish” her “white Catchup” could be “thicken’d with flour and butter,” using a technique that was “the same as if you were melting butter.” In her aim to produce a sauce that, she believed, was a good accompaniment “for [the] Turkey Fowls & Veal” that often appeared on British tables, she worked to turn southeast Asian ketchup (in its place of origin a thin, salty, vinegary sauce) into British ketchup (now a dense, creamy sauce). These instructions, for making ketchup into something it wasn’t – thick, not thin; buttery, not astringent; white, not brown – were an admittedly minute act of colonization, but they were a symbolic one nonetheless.[6] 

It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that Anglo-Americans began to incorporate tomatoes into their ketchup, making antecedents of the thick, red paste that we slather on fries, burgers, and hotdogs today.  But as we have seen, as early as the seventeenth century, early modern British women were colonizing condiments in the pages of their manuscript recipe books.


[1] “Ketchup, n.,” OED Online, March 2019, Oxford University Press, accessed April 10, 2019, http://www.oed.com.proxy.wm.edu/view/Entry/103080?rskey=SEQwHQ&result=2&isAdvanced=false.

[2] Jane Staveley, Receipt book of Jane Staveley, 1693-1694, V.a.401, Folger Shakespeare Library.

[3] Jane Staveley, Receipt book of Jane Staveley, 1693-1694, V.a.401, Folger Shakespeare Library.

[4] Anon., Cookbook, c. 1720, W.b.653, Folger Shakespeare Library.

[5] Mrs. Knight, Mrs. Knight’s receipt book, c. 1740, W.b.79, Folger Shakespeare Library.

[6] Jane Staveley, Receipt book of Jane Staveley, 1693-1694, V.a.401, Folger Shakespeare Library. For some recent studies of the ways that European scientists and natural philosophers (both amateur and traditionally-trained) appropriated, stole, managed, and bought information from indigenous Americans and African-descended people, many of whom were enslaved, see Christopher Parsons, “The Natural History of Colonial Science: Joseph-François Lafitau’s Discovery of Ginseng and Its Afterlives,” William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 73, No. 1 (January 2016); Kathleen S. Murphy, “Collecting Slave Traders: James Petiver, Natural History, and the British Slave Trade,” William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 4 (October 2013), 637-670; Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, Daniela Bleichmar, Paula De Vos, Kristin Huffine, and Kevin Sheehan, eds. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew, Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (New York: Routledge, 2008).