It all started with a tweet about a condiment. Heinz, the popular tomato sauce (ketchup) brand, took to Twitter on Thursday with a poll about a potential product launch, a concept they billed as novel to American consumers: a pre-made combination of mayonnaise and tomato sauce.
They called it “mayochup.”
“Want #mayochup in stores? 500000 votes for ‘yes’ and we’ll release it to you saucy Americans,” Heinz tweeted.
While the product is already available in some countries in the Middle East, Heinz wanted to know if Americans would be receptive to a “US debut”, the company said. The votes poured forth, totalling more than 680000 by yesterday morning. And so did the headlines: “‘Mayochup’ is the hybrid condiment you never knew you wanted”.
NBC’s Today wrote that the new sauce was the solution to “the dual-
delight dilemma” of choosing between mayonnaise and ketchup when making a sandwich.
“That’s right, mayonnaise plus ketchup in one beautiful squeeze bottle.” But in other corners of Twitter, the poll elicited a less jovial response.
“Mayochup?” A US “debut?” For many Americans, particularly those in the Latino community, the concept of combining mayonnaise and ketchup is nothing new. In fact, the combination is just about as ingrained in Caribbean cuisine as plantains and rice.
One food blog called it “more boricua (Puerto Rican) than the coquí,” the island’s native species of small tree frog. “Puerto Ricans bathe in it”, as one Twitter user put it. Sometimes adding a touch of garlic or adobo seasoning, Puerto Ricans smother it on just about anything fried: mofongo and tostones - both made with fried plantains - yuca, potato chips and more.
But ask any Puerto Rican and there’s an important difference: It’s called “mayoketchup,” pronounced my-oh-ketchup. “And we invented it ages ago,” one Puerto Rican user tweeted.
Some on Twitter even accused Heinz of “appropriating,” “gentrifying” or even “colonising” the beloved mayo-tomato sauce combination. What started with a Twitter poll about a condiment soon became an international dispute. Who really invented the mayo-tomato sauce, and what do you even call it?
The condiment is popular across Latin America, with different names and variations based on the country.
In Costa Rica, Colombia, Venezuela and other places, it’s referred to as “salsa rosada,” or “pink sauce”. In Colombia and Venezuela, one might spoon a dollop of the condiment on an arepa, and in Costa Rica, one might eat it with a pejibaye, a peach-palm fruit.
Legend actually places the origins of the condiment in the 1920s in Argentina, where it’s often referred to as “salsa golf”. According to lore, a teenager named Luis Federico Leloir was eating prawns with friends when he decided to try an experiment, Ozy recounted.
Joking around with his buddies, he mixed mayonnaise and tomato sauce to accompany the prawns, christening the sauce “salsa golf”.
The combination apparently took off in the 1960s, when big brands started producing it. Decades later, Leloir would gain wide fame - but not for the sauce.
He ended up winning the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1970 for “his discovery of sugar nucleotides and their role in the biosynthesis of carbohydrates,” according to the Nobel website.
“If I had patented the sauce,” he reportedly once said.
“I would have earned much more money than as a scientist.”
Thousands of miles away in Utah, the sauce has a cult following, under a different name.
“Fry sauce”, they call it. A chef named Don Carlos Edwards introduced it to Utahans in the 1940s, serving it to customers on hamburgers and alongside chips at his barbecue joint.
Eventually, his barbecue restaurant turned into the Arctic Circle restaurant chain, spreading across the West Coast and Northwest. Eater wrote: “The condiment made a quick sweep through Central America, Eastern Europe, the Balkan countries and a select few countries in the Middle East before the comparable Thousand Island dressing popped up in a New Orleans cookbook in 1900.”
Variations of the sauce are also popular in Germany, and even Iceland.
In the UK, a different version is known as “Marie Rose sauce”.
But whatever it’s called, many lifelong lovers of the sauce agree it’s disgraceful to squeeze the stuff out of a bottle.
“Yeah, you have to custom mix it. Gotta have the right mayo to ketchup ratio. I don’t trust this at all,” tweeted Nadege C Green, a reporter for South Florida NPR station WLRN,.
Heinz welcomed the do-it-yourself option, telling its Twitter followers to “show off your saucy skills, and try mixing your own” . In response to the “fierce debate” over the name “Mayochup,” Heinz said it will put the final name up for a vote before the US launch.” - The Washington Post