Catsup Cooking at the Cannery

Today the youngest daughter and I volunteered at the Mesa Cannery. It's always exciting to try to guess what product we are canning by the smell that wafts out at you as the door opens. Our cannery only produces a few items including salsa, ketchup and syrup so it's  usually pretty easy to narrow it down. My canning sessions with salsa are always followed by an intense desire for Mexican food and the last time we did syrup I had to make pancakes for dinner.  It's sometimes nice when we do ketchup because, since I'm not a ketchup fan, it doesn't bring any food cravings with it.  (However, the hubby did take me to Culvers for a Butter Burger tonight.  I had mine ketchup-less).

As we entered and sat down by a gentleman from our ward I said, "Smells like we're doing ketchup today" and he replied, "Unless we're doing cat-sup."  Now I grew up in small town Utah and we (most people, but not me) ate ketchup.  Sometimes it was spelled ketchup and sometimes it was spelled catsup, but it was all the same thing and the names were interchangeable.  According to this gentleman there is a difference.  Of course when I got home I had to google ketchup vs. catsup and I am still pretty sure they are the same thing.

This is what I learned:
 ketchup was what it was called back when it was first introduced to the world pre-1700.
The British called it catsup somewhere along the way.
Southerners seem to prefer catsup.
Some people say catsup is spicier.
Ketchup is the most accepted name today and is what is printed on most brands.
Also, if you type catsup it shows up as a mis-spelling on the computer.

If you are interested in more info (and some ketchup/catsup pictures) you can go here.

Well, back to the cannery.  Today we canned (or bottled) catsup.  See Exhibit A below.

I got the job of putting lids on the bottles after the catsup was squirted in.  This is my most regular cannery assignment.  I must look like I have good manual dexterity or something. The bottles come out 4 at a time, pretty quickly, but there are usually 3 or 4 people in this area, so if you are at the front of the line and you miss a bottle someone else will catch it later.  If you are at the end of the line this is a REALLY BORING job and you spend most of your time spacing the bottles evenly to go through the machine that sucks the air out of them.  Today I was 2nd in line, a good spot to be.

The youngest daughter got to remove the bottles from the cooling tunnel and place them on the conveyor belt to get labeled and boxed.  I worked this area once.  I liked it because it is a loud area, I got to wear ear plugs and I could sing my entire repertoire of songs, at the top of my lungs and no one could hear me.  (The daughter says she thinks they could still hear me and that is embarrassing, but I asked the man who was standing next to me and he said no, and I trust him. He was reciting a 2 million stanza poem that he memorized and I only know that because he told me, not because I could hear him.)

We worked the afternoon shift and luckily we only had to work for about 2 hours. I got to man one of the clean up hoses when we were finished and squirt catsup off of all the equipment.  I managed to get a lot of hot, catsupy water all over me, but it was fun to spray everything.  I enjoyed spending some time giving service with my daughter, but I'm glad I don't have to work a production job everyday.

A final note concerning catsup.  Even though it is spelled catsup and the pronunciation dictionary says to say it cat- sup.  I was raised to call it all ketchup (catch up).  Cat sup sounds like something I would give my cats for dinner.  However, they might actually like some catsup on their cat food.  They have been extremely interested in the shoes that I wore to the cannery since they got marinated in catsup water.

Today I am thankful for

the opportunity to do service with my daughter.  I am enjoying having her around.
cheap and yummy wholewheat raisin bread from the Alpine Bread Bakery Outlet.
lentils.