Editorial Letter Available to Purchase

In the early 1990s, my grandmother travelled to Canada to visit her son/my uncle for the first time since the Fall of Communism in Romania in 1989. She took numerous trips back and forth between Romania and Canada over this decade, and these trips resulted in the appearance of some new and unexpected recipes in her culinary repertoire, which historically had been based on staple Romanian-Moldavian dishes and constrained by the limitations of state-imposed rationing. One such recipe is ketchup, which I remember as a core homemade condiment in my early and mid-teens diet, accompanying eggs, potatoes, and kabanos sausages. Her recipe calls for: 10 kilograms of tomatoes, 4 kilograms of peppers, 2 kilograms of celery root, 2 cups of oil, 2 cups of sugar, 2 tablespoons of salt, 4 tablespoons of pepper, 4 tablespoons of thyme, 1 cup of vinegar, and hot pepper (optional). The resulting product was quite...