This ketchup is red, but that's all it has in common with a bottle of Heinz's. Festive cranberry ketchup, a nice alternative to chunky cranberry sauce, goes well with turkey, duck, beef or a nut roast.
Tomato ketchup? Fish ketchup!
Mr Heinz is most certainly largely responsible for the $20 billion worth of the condiment globally sold a year. In UK alone we eat (or at least buy) about 20k tonnes of the stuff. And if you ask anyone what ketchup is made from, you'll get a disbelieving chuckle from even the least food wise: 'well duh!'
But it's not quite so 'duh'. Tomato ketchup is only one type of the condiment and actually, relatively, the most recently developed. Ketchup was invented in China and it was originally a kind of fish sauce, made from fermented fish and spices.
Salty and sweet is a relatively new taste for the Europeans but in the Far East they have known what’s best for ages. Indonesian kecap or ketjap meant ‘fish sauce’ indeed and that’s where the word came from into English.
Not all about tomatoes
From fish to tomatoes, ketchup meandered via various other base ingredients. It was mushrooms in 18th century, walnuts in the 19th and oysters, beans and even grapes throughout the modern times. Tomato ketchup originated in America in the times when people thought tomatoes had medicinal properties.
So this recipe is more in the spirit of Jane Austen than McDonalds. It's a festive, cranberry version and it is very tasty indeed. My recipe is adapted from NY Times Cooking.
How to cook cranberry ketchup?
Don’t be afraid of salt - it needs quite a lot of saltiness to break the sweetness and acidity, thus providing the justification to be called ketchup.
Fresh or frozen cranberries can be used, with the latter though you need to be mindful of their water content, and cook the sauce down accordingly to achieve the required thickness.
Onion provides sharpness, and it can be finely chopped or blitzed in a food processor.
The berries and the onion are simmered briefly in apple cider, though you can replace it with orange or apple juice, adjusting the acidity and sweetness. Once they start to soften and burst, the ketchup can be blended. The easiest way is to insert a stick blender into the saucepan and puree the sauce, but you can also transfer the lot into a food processor or a blender, and in the worst case push it through a sieve.
Once the sauce is pureed, all the aromatics can be stirred in and adjusted to taste. Note though that as a condiment cools down, it becomes milder in taste so if you want it on the sharper side, make it a little too sharp when it's still warm.
It keeps very well, not surprisingly with quite a high sugar and acid content, a couple of weeks in the fridge easily in an airtight jar or tub. But make sure to serve it at room temprature rather than straight from the fridge for the flavour to be full.
More cranberry recipes
Thick and flavoursome cranberry butter is like cranberry sauce on steroids and it can be used as jam, jelly or confiture too. There's no dairy in fruit butters!
Cranberry sauce with orange juice, the simplest recipe. The cranberry sauce cooks itself, can be made ahead of time and keeps well in the fridge.
Mini cranberry pies, shortcrust pastry made from scratch filled with easy to make cranberry butter instead of traditional mincemeat. Mince pies? Make mine a cranberry this Christmas!
More condiment recipes
Hot honey, the sweet and spicy condiment that is drizzled over pizzas, cottage cheese and roast chicken everywhere, is very easy to make very well and even easier to make on the quick, with a shortcut.
Greengage jelly with chilli and rosemary is a full of flavour, unusual condiment. It’s a cross between greengage chutney and plum jam and it’s perfect with lamb.
Kewpie-style mayonnaise, the umami bomb of a condiment, which you can make at home in exactly one minute. A stick blender and a tall jar make true magic happen.