Why does the recipe for ketchup call for bell peppers?

Why does the recipe for ketchup call for bell peppers? - Served business lunch in modern cafe

The recipe in the Joy of Cooking for tomato ketchup calls for an initial mixture of tomatoes pulp with "bell red peppers".

Recipe is here

At least in my area bell red peppers have very little taste and are mostly used just as a flavorless substrate for ranch dips and things like that.

Why would the recipe be calling for this item? Do they actually mean a cayenne pepper?

pepperketchup


Best Answer

I did some further research on this question and what I found is that originally (more than 100 years ago), there were a lot of different types of "catsup", grape catsup, tomato catsup, mushroom catsup, cucumber catsup, etc. The two most common types were tomato and red pepper catsup, where tomato catsup was made with tomatoes and pepper catsup was made from bell peppers. Tomato catsup was normally a spicy catsup and bell pepper catsup was a "sweet pickle". So, for example, here are typical early recipes:

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So, in the above recipe we can see it is designed to be strong with cayenne pepper, black pepper, mustard, onions etc. Now compare to the bell pepper catsup:

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So, we can see the bell pepper catsup is designed to be mild. Naturally, the inevitable happened: somebody just conflated the two recipes, mixing ingredients from both. The first example of this I could find was by one "Mrs. Scattergood" in an 1897 ladies journal:

enter image description here

We can see this recipe has the same weird combination of a huge amount of tomatoes with 2 small red bell peppers found in the Joy of Cooking. This recipe seems to be the origin of what ended up in the Joy of Cooking.

So, ultimately there is no logic to it, it is just some random lady from Albany randomly combining what should be separate recipes.



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Why does the recipe for ketchup call for bell peppers? - Girl Slicing Bell Peppers
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Why are bell peppers called that?

We know sweet peppers as large, hollow, thick-fleshed vegetables (technically a fruit, though try to find someone who cares), but the original strain was named \u201cbell\u201d for a very good reason. It had a rather hard, thin wall, and contained an elongated vestigial stigma inside.

Is a tomato a pepper?

Peppers \u2014 including both hot peppers and sweet peppers \u2014 are yet another food crop in the family Solanaceae that originated in the Americas. However, unlike tomatoes and potatoes, peppers do not belong to the genus Solanum. Instead, they are members of the genus Capsicum.

What to cook with excess peppers?

Flavorful Soups
  • Roasted Pepper & Butternut Squash Soup.
  • Roasted Red Pepper Soup.
  • Bell Pepper Chicken & Dill Soup.
  • Turkey Stuffed Bell Peppers.
  • Long Sweet Pepper Boats.
  • Bell Peppers Stuffed with Tomato Couscous.
  • Mini Sweet Pepper & Orange Cranberry Muffins.
  • Bell Pepper Cornbread.



    • How to Make: Homemade Bell Pepper Ketchup -only 1 ingredient - easy recipes by Chef Pachi



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    Images: DLKR, Daniel Reche, Kampus Production, Sarah Chai

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