In Defense of Ketchup
It’s one of the most versatile ingredients in your kitchen.
Few ingredients are as polarizing as ketchup—arguably the United States’ most widely used (and widely mocked) condiment. According to many food snobs, a single squirt of the stuff transforms any meal into lowbrow fare. And yet you'll find a bottle of it in 97 percent of American fridges. We say: Enough with the ketchup hate. Turns out, it’s one of the most versatile ingredients in your kitchen. And cooks around the world have the recipes to prove it.
After all, ketchup packs an especially potent flavor wallop, perfected over centuries of experimentation. Vinegar and added sugars boost tomatoes' natural acidity and sweetness, while its savory backbone begins with glutamic acid—an amino acid found in tomatoes that provides rich umami notes—and is further enhanced by salt. The resulting balance of sweet, salty, tangy and umami adds instant oomph to any dish.
Ketchup is thought to have originated from the Chinese ke-tsiap, a fermented fish sauce that dates back centuries. Over time, it spread through Southeast Asia (including Malaysia and Indonesia, where kecap manis, a sweet soy sauce, is integral to the cuisine). Trade routes took it into Europe, and by the 18th century, the British had started making their own versions with ingredients like mushrooms, walnuts and anchovies. But in America, it merged with the New World addition of tomatoes, eventually evolving into the tangy-sweet version we know today. And in this form, it has found a place in many cuisines outside the U.S.
For example, Japanese cooks use ketchup to bolster tonkatsu sauce, drizzled over the crispy fried meat cutlets for which it’s named, while in Korea, ketchup mixed with gochujang becomes a go-to glaze for vegetables and tofu. And in India, ketchup is a standard component of the popular Indo-Chinese dish gobi Manchurian, or fried cauliflower florets tossed in a tangy-sweet sauce. (Across India, Maggi brand ketchup has developed something of a cult following—so much so that Maggi ketchup sandwiches are a mainstay concession of Indian railways.)
In fact, ketchup has come full circle, returning to China to become a staple ingredient of gu lao rou, or sweet and sour pork. In Hong Kong, we learned that classic sauce includes ketchup. Back at Milk Street, when attempting to recreate the dish in our own kitchen, we tested many approaches to approximate the flavor of the Cantonese-style recipe—and found that there was simply no substituting ketchup for its powerful pop of sweet and sour.
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Shaula Clark
Shaula Clark is a Boston-based writer and editor. Her six-year stint as managing editor of Milk Street’s magazine absolutely leveled up her cooking game—though her trusty canine sous chef, Roxie the Schipperke, remains unimpressed unless cheese is involved. In the kitchen, she likes to get weird, with experiments yielding both great success (absinthe sorbet) and dismal failure (liquid smoke-infused rice paper “bacon”). Thanks to a terrifyingly productive tomato garden, Milk Street’s salmorejo—a luscious Andalusian tomato soup—has become a particular favorite recipe. She is, for the record, also staunchly pro-ketchup. Disagreements over her stance on condiments may be sent to .
