Sweet Banana Ketchup

I rediscovered an old friend yesterday - Philippino Sweet Banana Ketchup.

When I first went to Latvia in the early nineties, just a few months after the Soviet Union had fallen apart, sometimes food was hard to come by. Granted, nobody starved, but the stores and market shelves offered very little variety, and especially, very little that was fresh. It was spring when I arrived, so other than carrots and potatoes from the previous harvest, there was still almost no vegetable to be had until the summer.

But, my favorite, pasta, was there. No pasta sauce though... Everyone used ketchup, which I found to be the most insipid thing in the world - ketchup on pasta, you gotta be kidding me! How insulting to centuries of Italian tradition, and how yucky! However, one product saved me, and that was Sweet Banana Ketchup from the Philippines. Even then I was baffled, at two thing: Why was Philippino ketchup sold in Latvia, of all places, and second, how can you make ketchup from bananas? But, it tasted acceptable on pasta, and that was all that mattered to me.

So, yesterday I was invited to diner in a private home here in Dumaguete, Philippines. The mistress of the household had made a wonderful sweet and sour meatball dish, scrumptious Adobe Chicken, and some fried meat balls, which were served with... wait for it... Sweet Banana Ketchup! It was like a class reunion for me, getting reacquainted with a long-lost friend. And it still tasted just as sweet as it did back in the early 1990’s. But even as I read the ingredient list, I still could not figure out how you can make red ketchup from yellow bananas...

Gaston