Ketchup

Fried starch has salt and fat and nothing else. This supplies the other four.

Sugar, acid and glutamate against ground fat. The burger is not negotiable.

Fried yolk fat wants acid; the sugar is what makes it breakfast, not dinner.

Cured smoke against cooked tomato. A bacon sandwich has two correct sauces.

Vinegar cuts the rendered fat, sugar sticks the meat back together again.

Lactic fat under sweet acid. Grilled cheese and ketchup is not a childish idea.

Two bottled ferments: one sweet and blunt, the other sharp and thin.

Fry sauce. Fat plus acid plus sugar, and nobody has improved the ratio.

Both are cooked-down sugar. Ketchup is what a fried onion becomes in a jar.

Sweetness on the tongue, volatile heat in the nose. The cocktail-sauce split.

Battered fish is fat and salt. The vinegar in the bottle is doing lemon's job.

Sweetness needs a dry irritant behind it or it slides off the plate.

Smoke and dried chilli turn the sugar into a barbecue sauce in one stir.

Ketchup began as fish brine. Adding it back closes a two-century loop.

Two sweet-acid pastes. The Korean one supplies the heat the bottle skips.

Glaze a rib with both: the vinegar sets the sugar, the oak stays behind.

Put the umami back where the recipe removed it. Salt the sweetness hard.

Both fermented, both bitter-sweet. Cocoa gives ketchup a mole's floor.

Same furaneol, same sugar-acid balance. One is a sauce, one is a fruit.