Banana Ketchup

There is such a thing? Yes, apparently in the Philippines. And if you look hard enough, even here in the States.

I wonder if there are Greek diners in the Philippines where when you reach for the upside down bottle of Ketchup for your hamburger or French fries, you are actually going to get banana ketchup to come out of the bottle.

And there's a reason it might be banana ketchup, and you can read why that might be when you catch up (Ketchup?) to one of those "Overlooked No More" obituaries in The New York Times.

Started a few years ago, The Times obituary desk is sort of making up for the women who might have been overlooked over the years for a tribute obituary because there was a bias toward just reporting about deceased men.

Thus, we have an obituary for Maria Orosa (1893-1945), credited with inventing banana ketchup because tomatoes were hard to grow in the tropical Philippine climate, and tomato ketchup was expensive to import.

Maria was educated in the United States, entering the country when she was 23 as a government-sponsored scholar. She earned a bachelor's and master's degrees in chemistry and pharmaceutical sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Seth Mydans's obituary tells us: "Banana ketchup, which she created in the 1930s, is smoother and more viscous than the tomato version, making it a bit harder to shake out of the bottle. The concoction—made of local saba bananas, sugar, vinegar and spices, with a dash of red coloring to make it look more like the imported version—is now a staple on the shelves of Philippine grocery stores." 

After her studies, Maria returned to the Philippines to help her country become self-sufficient in food production. She joined the government's Bureau of Science, "soon leading its home economics and food preservation divisions."

Banana ketchup became mass-produced in 1942 and became so popular that Heinz introduced its own version in 2019, saying it was doing so "in honor of Maria Orosa."

I'm not the one who does the grocery shopping, so I don't know if the banana ketchup product is on the supermarket shelves in the stores my wife shops in.

If we find it, I'm willing to try it. I just doubt that any Greek diner I happen to go to will have a bottle of it alongside the tomato ketchup.

http://www.onofframp.blogpsot.com