Ketchup flap: Heinz will catch up in California

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Anyone who's ever pounded on the bottom of the ketchup bottle to get those last few dollops will appreciate the saga of Bill Baker, a retired carpenter who forced H.J. Heinz Co. to squeeze out just a little more of the red stuff for millions of ketchup fans.

In 1995, Baker, of Redding, Calif., bought a 20-ounce bottle of Heinz ketchup for his wife's meatloaf. Her recipe called for 2½ cups ketchup, or 20 ounces, but the bottle came up a few ounces short. So Baker called the state's Division of Measurement. Why would a 20-ounce bottle contain less than 20 ounces, he wondered.

Good question. Baker's query eventually touched off a statewide investigation and consumer protection lawsuit that lasted five years.

Heinz agreed in November to overfill its plastic 18- to 64-ounce ketchup containers in California for the next 12 months to make up for the short-weighting. The agreement will require about 10 million extra ounces or about 78,000 gallons of free ketchup for Californians at a cost to the company of $650,000. (A mere drop in the bucket, considering that the company sells more than $1 billion of ketchup worldwide.)

Still, the moral of the Baker brouhaha is obvious: Don't mess with our ketchup. Americans take every drop of their favorite condiment seriously.

We have been eating ketchup, in various forms, since the 1700s when we got it from the British (who got it a hundred years earlier from the Chinese). Back then it was spicy and tart and made from nuts or fruits or mushrooms. It didn't contain sugar; it wasn't even red.

Eventually, tomatoes turned it rosy, but sugar still was not part of the recipe in the early 19th century. Then, after the Civil War, ketchup became sweeter. When Henry J. Heinz began making his version in the late 1800s, it was basically the sweet, mildly spicy condiment we squirt on our hot dogs, burgers and fries more than a century later.

Thanks to Baker, California is now getting its full share of ketchup. As for the rest of the country, we can only imagine what we would do with a few extra free ounces of the ubiquitous red condiment. Would we just order a bigger helping of fries? Or are there more creative ways of using a few tablespoons of ketchup?

In some recipes, a small amount of ketchup can be substituted for an equal amount of tomato paste, although keep in mind that ketchup is much sweeter and packs much less of a tomato flavor.

Ketchup usually works best in spicy sauces, where it lends a background flavor. Asian barbecue sauces, with soy sauce and rice wine vinegar to cut the sweetness, are a good foil for ketchup. So are braising liquids that depend mostly on broth and wine with the ketchup adding a slight hint of tomato.