An Ode to Tomatoes, and Tomato Soup

Years ago, when we visited my father’s sister in Vadodara, she gave us bottles of homemade pumpkin ketchup, which she told us was “as good as tomato ketchup from the market”. It wasn’t.

I remembered that when I read that an Ahmedabad company was

recently busted for manufacturing ‘tomato sauce’ without tomatoes. It used potatoes combined with starch, flavourings, acetic acid (vinegar) and colouring. Presumably it worked better than my aunt’s kaddu ketchup, which never made it beyond reluctant family members, while this tomato trickery seems to have been a thriving operation.


Ketchup can be made without tomatoes. Malaysian kecap, from which it may derive its name, is a soy sauce. Early Western recipes were made from mushrooms, walnuts and shellfish. Filipinos love banana ketchup, a product developed by food scientist María Y Oroso during World War II, to make up for a lack of tomatoes. Oroso, who died heroically during the Battle of Manila (1945), helped Filipinos survive the war by developing many nutritious products, including this sauce made by cooking bananas, sugar, vinegar and spices.

Mostly, though, ketchup now implies tomatoes and there are good reasons for this. The general taste profile of ketchup is sweet-savoury, livened by a tangy kick — this is why sugar and vinegar are in most recipes. They are also high in umami, the savoury fifth taste, which is found in ingredients like mushrooms and shellfish. Really good tomatoes are naturally sweet-savoury, hence the confusion about them being vegetables or fruit.

Cooking tomatoes increases their umami content and they are sour when unripe, so a large batch will have enough to give a natural tangy taste. This acidity also prevents tomato preparations from going bad fast. This is a big reason for their popularity in soups, especially those being served in places like the railways, where there might be a lag between preparation and serving.

The Times of India in 1933, in an article by a ‘Mrs Elliott’, commends vegetable soups like tomato for freeing cooks from the tyranny of meat stocks, which make everything into “a tasteless watery concoction in which float odd bits of unrecognisable things.

Bridget White-Kumar’s recently published compilation of colonial Indian recipes, History on a Plate, has a recipe for railway tomato soup where a base of fresh tomatoes is spiced with ginger, garlic, chilli and pepper powder, and ketchup added at the end to intensify the taste. No wonder Indian train travellers took to tomato soup so well. There are many ways to play around with recipes for tomato soup, like roasting the tomatoes or adding vodka (ideal for chilled soup). A particularly good one is Lindsey Bareham’s idea of adding plums to tomatoes, both tangy-fruity ingredients combining to make something exceptional.

Tomato soup is also important as an ingredient in its own right. Famously, chicken tikka masala is said to have been invented when a British-Pakistani chef, Ali Ahmed Aslam, who ran the restaurant Shish Mahal in Glasgow, got a customer who demanded ‘gravy’ with his chicken tikka. Aslam opened a can of tomato soup and heated it with cream and spices and poured it on the chicken.

Others have claimed this story is a fabrication, but it is one which created its own reality, since many people started making chicken tikka masala with tomato soup. Canned spaghetti is another product that evolved from canned tomato soup. Shane Warne depended on it during his cricketing tours of India, refusing to eat spicy local food.

But perhaps the strangest recipe made with canned tomato soup is a cake. The title recipe in Sylvia Plath’s Tomato Soup Cake, a collection of favourite recipes from a range of writers, is one which we’re told the poet cooked the day she wrote her poem Death & Co, just three months before killing herself. The cake is, apparently, excellent, with the fruity acidity of tomato soup balancing the sweetness of the other ingredients.