Here it is, Day One of Actually Making the Koehler Ketchup, from the recipe handed down from my Grandma Evea Flora Folan Koehler, if you must know. No more excuses of procrastination, I have entered the final product in the Denver County Fair which starts in 4 days, and I have 3 of those, max, to turn something in.
Since I have generations of German Catholics in my blood, and in my head, the reasons for procrastination range from the noble, to the perfectionist, to the practical and ridiculous. Maybe they're all the same. Did I mention a good slice of my ancestors, notably the ones who made this ketchup every year, were- get this- German AND Catholic. AND they lived on the alternately freezing-cold and scorching-hot plains of South Dakota. (Okay, so my grandmother who practiced this recipe was actually of Irish descent. Whatever.)
None of us have even tasted the legendary Koehler Ketchup for at least 13 years, since before the time when I disowned my parents. Just last summer (2011) I got back in touch with my dad because my brother called to tell me he was dying. He sort of was, but he's still alive, I'm happy to say. And now I'm in the process of helping my brother find them some sort of assisted living situation that does not include dwelling in the same townhome with him, in Phoenix.
So anyway, during that almost 12 years of total separation, I had no interest in thinking about anything to do with them, much less making, on purpose, any of the family recipes. And then at the very beginning of last year (2011) I had the opportunity (it's so freeing to call it that) to clean out my parents' house in Parker, Colorado, after my brother had moved them to Phoenix right before Christmas. In the six weeks of cleaning out that house, which despite my brother's and Uncle Tom's best efforts was still full of C-R-A-P, we threw away a ton of stuff, recycled a metric ton, sold off a few valuables, gave a garage-full to ARC, and I kept very, very few things.
One of those things was a water-bath canning pot, fairly jumbo in size. On the last day of cleaning when we were scanning the garage for anything worthwhile, I spied it there, sitting on top of the old refrigerator, and rescued it. My husband raised an eyebrow but I put it in the car whilst explaining, "This is a canner. For making the Koehler Ketchup." That's all I had to say. He had tasted the magnificence before we were married and knew what I was talkin' bout.
So the canning pot has been sitting in the basement for about a year and a half. Which brings me to my other procrastination excuses. This ketchup is not just any ketchup, as you might be beginning to apprehend. It is one of the very few unsullied items from my upbringing and my family that I still have good memories about. At our best, and I mean our imaginary, mythic best that existed maybe for a few minutes in real life, we are all sitting around the kitchen table eating, and talking about food. My parents would talk about how food used to taste, before supermarkets and factory farms came along. It had taste, first of all, they would say. And they would debate the relative sweetness of Nebraska corn to Olathe corn, and store-bought tomatoes to home-grown. There's really no debate about tomatoes of course, more the lamenting of the sheer awfulness of those gassed-up greenhouse mealy-ass articles that pass for tomatoes these days.
At our worst, of course, was the "normal" of my life growing up, 24-7. All of us contorting ourselves around my mother's psychotic, but undiagnosed narcissism in various maladaptive ways. My father just tuning out and disassociating, because that's what he learned to do as a child, suffering through the violent haze of his father's drinking and jack-of-all-trades insecurity. And in both generations, constant, debilitating instability of finances. In other words, poverty. In those days, in the Midwest, food insecurity did not lead to starvation and annihilation, necessarily. Food insecurity led to canning.
Canning is what you do when you don't know what's coming down the pike tomorrow. Canning is hard work, but it's relaxing and satisfying when you have 12 children to feed and an inconsistent bread-winner for a husband. Hence my father's preparing-for-the-Apocalypse shopping habits, buying 6 cans of green beans every week no matter what, because even if there's no money coming in, there's food in the pantry.
So I put this ketchup on a pedestal for a long time. I said, I WILL NOT MAKE IT UNLESS IT IS WITH MY OWN HOME-GROWN TOMATOES! Well, we've been renting the past five years, and my container tomatoes don't even ripen until September. ALRIGHT THEN- I WILL NOT MAKE IT UNLESS IT IS WITH LOCALLY GROWN, ORGANIC TOMATOES FROM THE FARMER'S MARKET! Well, we had a busy weekend and I didn't make it there.
So I went to Whole Foods. And as I was picking out the tomatoes, there on the Muzak was Glen Campbell singing "Rhinestone Cowboy" - one of my dad's all-time favorites. I had talked to him earlier, while he was at dialysis and he seemed tickled that I was trying to make the Ketchup, and had entered it in the County Fair. "Remember to use about one-third cherry tomatoes, and two-thirds regular tomatoes- those give it the tartness."
And the rest, you'll have to guess, because this recipe is going to the grave with me.
