The Threat To America That Is Barack Hussein Obama

So you'd have a tomasil?

Well, except kissing. I think Obama should have a bow of garlic on the White House door in case DICK Cheney comes a'visitin'.

I need some pause before I address tomato sauce, without swearing.

Well, to start, I totally despise tomato paste. I can discern it from blocks away. I equate it with horrid pizza.

I can work up to imagining I might like it from a home in Sicily, but, as that is not open to me, I still despise tomato paste available in the u.s. I don't care who is the chef on tv..

Any of the above.

Why the confusion?

It's A2k!

I'm food loud.

This is probably a disability.

that's the spirit! Fun!!

here's how we find Ketchup, Catsup and Tomato Sauce in the U.S.



Ketchup and Catsup usually come in a bottle like the one above or more recently, the squeeze bottle. like the one below;


but in america, tomato sauce usually comes in a can, like this;


so, i guess the easiest way to remember the difference between the two, in america, would be;

Ketchup/Catsup is a condiment.

Tomato Sauce is an ingredient.

but what if i could tell you a way to use it that's not disgusting ?

Oh...then tomato sauce is different again from what I thought it was on my second take...we'd call that a tin of crushed tomatoes.

The kind of sauce I thought you meant was where the tomatoes and all the ingredients have been simmered together to let the flavours really develop and concentrate...the "gravy" in Soprano terms.

separated by a common language..

what you are calling "sauce" kind of is, but here it gets called specifically "spaghetti sauce" or "pasta sauce". although with the proliferation of cooking shows on the food network, it's getting kind of hip to use the Italian term, "gravy".

and here's another thing that's different. we have Crushed Tomatos too. but they are not the same as what we have for tomato sauce. or even tomato puree, for that matter.

for americans, Crushed Tomatos are kinda like somebody took some tomatos and kinda squashed them with the flat edge of a knife. similar to the way that you can give the garlic a little crush to make it easier to remove the papery skin. a little more mangled, but the same principle.

Tomato Puree is in between Crushed Tomatos and Tomato Sauce. the puree is ground up more than the crushed, rendering it into a thicker, but still liquified form.

Tomato Sauce, is very thin, contains no pulp or matter. it's totally liquified. uhh,, runny, even. by it's self, it's fairly weak and unappetizing. but if you think about it in terms of being kinda like the tomato version of chicken stock (probably completely in accurate..), and for similar use like adding volume, your kinda there.

don't know if you have Tomato Paste. it's kinda like a really, really reduced tomato rendering. very thick, concentrated and used to add body to existing Tomato ingredients.

when i make spaghetti sauce, i use all of them in varying amounts.

but what i always start with is Whole Plum Tomatos with Basil. rough cut 'em with the trusty santoku, throw 'em in the pot with all of the other stuff. they break down in a way that is totally different than pre-crushed, pre-diced or sauce.

So (Jeeze Americans are strange!) ... please explain the "cat" in catsup.
How does a tomato-based sauce (Sorry. "Sauce" as in Oz speak) get called something like Catsup?

it only gets better. gimme half a tick on this one...

Ketchup, i just learned, is based on a Chinese sauce for fish, called "kôe-chiap" or "kê-chiap".

i don't hear it much here on the west coast, but where i grew up, there were a lot of people that pronounced Catsup as "Ketsup".

which seems to have evolved, in the way that only american english can, from an earlier attempt to make "kê-chiap" sound 'merican by the pronunciation, "Catchup".

and more tomato trivia;; in early 20th century america, tomatos were nicknamed "love apples".

along the ohio river valley, they were also sometimes called, " 'maters " way back in the day.

Thanks for that explanation, DontTreadOnMe.

Yes, that ("kôe-chiap") does sort of makes sense. (I'm giving you a tick on that! )

(Sorry if I've caused more Googling than you probably wanted to indulge in, get to the bottom of this one.)

no worries. i'm starting to feel like a tomato-y version of mr. peabody.




btw, dtom is cool and cuts down on the typing.

When you refer to "gravy," i think you are referring to a regionalism. I had a roommate once who was from the large Italian community of southwest Illinois. He was of Sicilian descent. He referred to tomato sauce as "gravy," but knew we wouldn't know what we were talking about, so he explained. I suspect that it is called gravy by Sicilians and Calabrians. So it is either a regionalism in Italy, or a term used by Italian-Americans of Sicilian or Calabrian extraction. I have been told (and cannot vouch for it) that the northern Italians don't do tomato sauce, or use it very rarely.

The term dates back to the 16th or 17th century, and was common among all English speakers. Tomatoes were grown as an ornamental, and were considered poisonous. This is because the plant itself was clearly a member of the deadly nightshade family (as are a whole host of other plants which we eat, such as chili peppers and potatoes, and which includes tobacco).

There were many parts of the English speaking world which began to eat the tomato in the 18th century, but that was chiefly restricted to the West Indies and the American South. Most people in the English-speaking world continued to consider them poisonous until the 19th century. Then, at several places, people publicly demonstrated that they were not poisonous, and they quickly became commonly used as a food. A gentleman in Reynoldsburg, Ohio, Mr. Alexander Livingston, who became a world famous horticulturist, is credited with developing the seed for commercial tomato production. He is said to have stood on the courthouse steps in Reynoldsburg and to have eaten a peck of tomatoes before a horrified and fascinated crowd who expected him to fall down dead at any moment. He disappointed them, though, and Reynoldsburg calls itself the "home" of the tomato, and holds a big Tomato Festival every year.

Anyone who has ever grown their own tomatoes know it's an incredibly prolific plant. They will continue to produce tomatoes as you pick them until they are killed off by the first frost. One tomato plant, spreading across a few square feet of ground, can produce, with a minimum of effort on your part, more tomatoes than a couple can eat. We usually had two large tomato plants which produced all the tomatoes and tomato products we ate in a year's time--for several adults and children.

I LOVE 'maters!!!!!

Really? Who's mating around here?

me too! totally hated them when i was a kid, but now i go through at least a carton of cherry tomatos every week, just to snack on.

my grandfather called them 'maters. my ma told me that when she was young people still joked that if a girl ate a "love apple", she would become pregnant.

I'm the a2k representative tomato paste hater. That actually is an italian mode of processing tomatoes, and I may get over my disparagement with more temperate use of it by other folks.
I've been to italy some, but not as much as some others on a2k. I don't remember having a tomato sauce (salsa or ragu - as distinguished from ragout, two different things) in the north, but then I was usually interested in what was local, for example a tuna sauce for meat. In memory of menus, I'm thinking you are right on that, Set. Never ever heard the word "gravy" - which is of course a word in english - I figure a word of americans of southern italian/sicilian (erm, sometimes those are distinguished too) heritage.

I have ketchup a few times a year, same time I get 'fries with that'...

Bringing things around, when I was first exploring what was then called oriental cooking, I had a book which had a really good pan fried noodle recipe. It had lots of ingredients, and ketchup was one of them. I always thought that was odd, but, maybe the inclusion was not as odd as I thought.

Agree with dtom on the terrificness of good canned whole tomatoes as a sauce ingredient.