tomato sauce (was Re: SC - pie floaters)

[Gwynydd of Culloden]

- ----- Original Message -----
From: Adamantius

> Now this is interesting. To what extent, in the Oz culture, are tomato
> sauce and tomato ketchup inerchangable? ... tomato sauce, to
> Americans, is a completely different animal, either homemade or tinned,
> and it is most often an ingredient in various cooked dishes...often ends
up as a cooking
> liquid for things like stuffed cabbage or stuffed peppers, or in or on
> meatloaf, perhaps in vegetable soups.

Okay, now I have faced this problem a number of times when reading American
cookbooks.  They call for tomato sauce when they seem to need what I know as
tomato puree - perhaps with a bit of flavouring added?

Tomato sauce, on the other hand, unless in relation to pasta sauces and so
on (when it can mean just what you probably think - a flavoured
tomato-based, perhaps chunky, sauce), is a smooth, more or less thick (there
was a Fountain sauce ad  in which a child is trying to find the tomato sauce
in which his chip (french fry) will stand upright.

The bottle I have in the cupboard lists the ingredients as: "Tomatoes,
sugar, food acid (acetic), salt, spices".  This is used on sausages,
rissoles (hamburger patties), chops, chips, eggs, white bread ...  Some
Australians are almost addicted to the stuff (my Lady for one - I shudder
every time I see her put it on fried eggs).

> tomato ketchup
> (almost invariably a thinned, pureed chutney of tomatoes with vinegar
> and sugar, and various token "spices" in microscopic amounts, and almost
> never homemade except by loons like Ras or myself)

This sounds very much like I think of "ketchup", but I then have to wonder
what you use when you really want a dollop of "dead 'orse" on your "snags"
*grin*.

Gwynydd