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Comment by plusepsilon | Hacker News Reader

A lot of commoner food (like ketchup and soy sauce) would be revolutionary if they were discovered today. Ketchup is the perfect blend of umami (tomato), salt and vinegar. Soy sauce goes well with most anything. Many of the fancy sauces you pay bank are not as good as soy sauce or ketchup. They become common because they are sooo good but also a little boring once you get used to it.

Combining orange and chicken is simple but powerful because they are favorite foods for many people and they have completely different flavor profiles (of course orange chicken could be executed better than Panda Express!).

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Sometimes the only real problem with "commoner food" is that, being commercialized, they lose variety, which can lead to that boredom you speak of.

Take ketchup. From what I understand, a century ago, making homemade ketchup was a lot more common, and there was quite a bit more variety in the spices used. (This old cookbook -- http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/books/settleme... -- has three recipes for "catsup" on page 439-440 alone.) One of my great grand-aunts regularly made ketchup in Indiana, and it was very different from commercial ketchup. A fair bit runnier (no xantham gum), a fair bit "sweeter" (it used regular sugar instead of corn syrup / HFCS which may have contributed to this), and nice notes of garlic.

Commercial store bought ketchup, meanwhile, unfortunately seems stuck either being Heinz ketchup, or imitating Heinz ketchup.

Interesting. Ketchup is actually one of the products that I'm most picky about. When I come to store, I have a choice of 5 - 20 different varieties (depending on the store size); each of them tastes different, every company has a different idea about its consistency (some are dense, some are almost as thin as tomato juice). If they've lost variety, they must have done that over an orthogonal variable I don't even realize could be a spectrum.

This is not an accident: http://gladwell.com/the-ketchup-conundrum/

My mum always made her own ketchup. I distinctly remember helping as a kid - picking the tomatoes, washing them, hand grinding them and stirring the pot. The whole house would smell deliciously of tomatoes all day long. A sauce evoking that memory would have a strong impact on me.

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