If you missed this one in the complex and amusing discussion of food,
Southerns etc. take a look at it. Ned has an interesting point here.

At 06:28 AM 3/28/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>When we were researching a site where catsup was bottled, we found a
>newspaper account that remarked on the "hot" nature of the product.
>To palates accustomed to Heinz red bland sauce, a reference to catsup
>as "hot" was surprising and not a little distressing.
>
>To solve the puzzle, we compared modern and nineteenth-century catsup
>recipes. Sure enough, nineteenth-century catsup was a hot sauce, not
>a vegetable (as the Reagan Maladministration tried to classify it).
>Nineteenth-century catsup bottles resembled the modern ones, but the
>product was different. Product recognition through traditional
>container shapes is an important marketing concept, but it doesn't
>necessarily mean that the product has been constant through time.
>
>This realization led to insertion of catsup recipes in our report on
>the Collins Geddes cannery, which was published with a perfectly
>straight face by DelDOT.
>--
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Robert L. Schuyler
University of Pennsylvania Museum
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