How old is tomato ketchup

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List of Partners vendors. Those same applications could also be used here on Earth to learn how crops can be grown in more remote and harsh places, reports Robert Z. Pearlman for Space. Heinz hosted a live taste test of the new ketchup today on social media channels, including Twitter and Instagram.

Corryn Wetzel is a freelance science journalist based in Brooklyn. While these ketchups were either boiled into a sort of syrup or salted and left to ferment, they usually had something in common: an intensely salty and spicy flavor.

It may have been a bit intense on the palate, but its longevity before spoiling certainly helped drive its adoption. After reading that list of other forms of ketchup, you're probably wondering why tomato wasn't in the mix. As it turns out, the English considered the tomato to be poisonous for some time after their initial import to the country in the s, with the plant relegated to the garden rather than the kitchen.

That may have something to do with the tomato's acidity messing with lead pewter plates in a way that gave rise to lead poisoning. It was an American named James Mease who's credited with trying out the first tomato-based ketchup in Of course, he referred to the tomato as the "love apple," given its supposed aphrodisiac properties.

Mease's recipe is also notable for the fact that it incorporated alcohol , which, while shocking by today's standards, did have a bit of historic precedent based on how the Brits were making ketchup not even a hundred years earlier.

As the 18th century wore on, tomato ketchup gradually rose to prominence, with the first bottled ketchups sold about 25 years after Mease's breakthrough. The only issue weas how to preserve the product, given the relative short growing season of tomatoes.

That often meant the introduction of all sorts of sketchy artificial preservatives in order to make up for the fact that some of the tomatoes in use were months old castoffs. That included things like sodium benzoate, as well as coal tar to keep the stuff looking brighter and fresher when it was anything but.

Before vinegar became a standard ingredient, preservation of tomato-based sauces was an issue, as the fruits would quickly decompose. A relatively new company called Heinz introduced its famous formulation in , which contained tomatoes, distilled vinegar, brown sugar, salt and various spices. They also pioneered the use of glass bottles, so customers could see what they were buying.

Tomato-based ketchup slowly became the ubiquitous form of the condiment in the U. Today, Heinz is the best-selling brand of ketchup in the United States, with more than million bottles sold each year. With the rise of commercial ketchup, do-it-yourself recipes have all but gone extinct. And at least for Americans, it's impossible to imagine ketchup as anything other than bright red and tomato-y.

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