Re Ketjap pizza [Was: Re[2]: MDDM Ch. 23 Summary, Notes]

[John Bailey]

Mark, congratulations on your perseverance and dedication to digesting what 
sounds like one scary piece of work. Don't know if any further thoughts on 
ketjap are required here, but I've been away for a while and am just 
catching up, so here I go:

"Word History: The word ketchup exemplifies the types of modifications that 
can take place in borrowing - both of words and substances. The source of 
our word ketchup may be the Malay word kchap, possibly taken into Malay from 
the Cantonese dialect of Chinese. Kechap, like ketchup, was a sauce, but one 
without tomatoes; rather, it contained fish brine, herbs, and spices. 
Sailors seem to have brought the sauce to Europe, where it was made with 
locally available ingredients such as the juice of mushrooms or walnuts. At 
some unknown point, when the juice of tomatoes was first used, ketchup as we 
know it was born. But it is important to realize that in the 18th and 19th 
centuries ketchup was a generic term for sauces whose only common ingredient 
was vinegar. The word is first recorded in English in 1690 in the form 
catchup, in 1711 in the form ketchup, and in 1730 in the form catsup. All 
three spelling variants of this foreign borrowing remain current."

I don't see the use of ketjap on a pizza as any stranger than the use of 
stilton, which is to say, I find the use of stilton to be as weird as the 
use of ketjap. I don't find the combo particularly appetising...but...all of 
this reminds me of the peculiar pizza offerings in Vineland. I can't 
remember the exact name of the pizza place where Prairie works but it's a 
funny riff on the commercialisation of buddhist/New Age beliefs in the US. 
Also, the English Candy Drill always suggested to me that P has a somewhat 
wary perspective of the Learned English Palate.

As for ketjap, I bought some a few weeks back and wouldn't dare try it on a 
pizza. In one of those 'what-the-hell-can-I-do-with-this-now' moments, a 
friend and I worked out a very successful tofu don, which might fit have 
been available at Prairie's place of employment but certainly worked for me. 
Marinate silky tofu in ketjap, fry with caramelized onions, add some more 
ketjap and a bit of Japanese shoyu sauce, throw on a couple of egg whites at 
the last second so that they solidify a little, and dump the lot on some 
jasmine rice. Hot diggety dog.

P's use of food is very visceral, I think is intended to evoke a very 
physical reaction (thinking Candy Drill, Mexico's banquet revolution, giant 
vegetables in MD, even the first page of Vineland brings up chocolate Quik 
on Cap'n Crunch, if I recall). Some of it seems to also inflect other 
themes: what people eat, and how, where, etc are important. Making a 
ketjap-based pizza: foodstuffs and preparation styles are often the things 
which bleed across imperialist/nationalistic boundaries, and Dixon has 
already had some inklings of the problems in enjoying Cape ketjap whilst 
ignoring the concurrent racism going on nearby. Back home, he displays 
ketjap as an Orientalist wonder which he's brought home, and what sounds 
like a pretty average pizza impresses the locals. Lots there. Interesting 
stuff.

>From: Mark Wright AIA <mwaia at yahoo.com>
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: Re Ketjap pizza [Was: Re[2]: MDDM Ch. 23 Summary, Notes]
>Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2001 08:01:04 -0800 (PST)
>
>Howdy
>
>Well, I made the ketjap pizza.
>
>I used David Morris's ketjap recipe, which you recall is brown sugar,
>soy sauce, mollases, cilantro, black pepper. I substituted a small
>amount of ginger for the galangal, which is a medicinal root with a
>mild flavor somehow related to ginger. I got some good stilton and
>anchovies. I used a small unflavored-and-oh-so-convenient premade pizza
>shell, as i normally do.
>
>The ketjap was thin and watery, like worchestershire sauce. It tened to
>migrate down through the little pricks in the bread and form a
>blackened crust of burnt molasses on the underside. The stilton melted
>and disintegrated into a puddle of oil and curds. As I like anchovies I
>really piled 'em on, even though only one or two is usually enough to
>"contaminate" an entire pie, according to my wife. The mould of the
>stilton and the high reek of the fish combine in a nice way. The soy
>and sugar ketjap was an all-but-irrelevant annoyance.  The "first
>British pizza is edible, but certainly isn't pizza as we know it. My
>ten year old son, who is game to try almost any strange food, at a
>small canape-sized sliver, said "that's peculiar", and stopped there. I
>ate the whole pie myself. It was easy on the old innards, but I did
>have vivid dreams involving eight hitch-hiking elephants and a
>percussion band. Could this be the famous the Welsh Rarebit effect?
>Echoes of the Octuple Glouchester? You tell me...
>
>DM's ketjap recipe is almost certainly not what P has in mind here. It
>does not have a viscous consistency, and its flavor is not especially
>exotic.  Jbor's sweet chili and tomato paste mix would have worked
>better, I think.
>
>I think the result would more than qualify as Vile. FWIW.
>
>Your man on the front lines of culinary conflict,
>Mark
>
>
>
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