There is No Sauce Like Hunger
Heinz 57 Sauce: On my 57th birthday, a brief taste-imonial.
IN THE SUMMER of 1979, when my father was about to turn 57, a package arrived at our house just outside Pittsburgh. Inside, packed in shredded paper, sat multiple bottles of products from Heinz, the Pittsburgh ketchup and pickles institution that built its empire (think Heinz Field) on a slogan: “57 varieties.” How they got our address in 1979, well before the internet mined customer data, is still beyond me.
My father was pleased as we cracked open the bottles, but he also came out with one of his usual cryptic statements that always seemed to have a lot of weight and portent to them. “There is no sauce like hunger.”
Today, on my 57th birthday, I’m here to tell you briefly about the tastiest sauce in that box, and perhaps anywhere, because it has been an obsession for me ever since: Heinz 57 Sauce. “Seventeen flavors blended into one!” as the company used to say.
Even with the Heinz name behind it, for most people it’s delightfully obscure. It’s nowhere near as famous as Heinz Ketchup, which I’ve found in the most far-flung of places on multiple continents (thanks, Broken Hill, Australia, and Gusau, Nigeria). It’s not as famous as Heinz Mustard, even, or Heinz Pickles or Heinz Barbecue Sauce. But it is a condiment like no other.
It is zesty (as it describes itself) with garlic and onion but also sweet and redolent of fruits like the raisins and apples that go in it.
It is a steak sauce, but it also isn’t.
It is perhaps in the ketchup family, but as more of a third cousin twice removed who hasn’t shown up for holiday gatherings since the first Bush administration.
Waffle House, though, understands its appeal. Heinz 57 Sauce is not only available there but actually printed on their menu as being available there (see tiny bottles at bottom right, above). The only thing that can make peppered and smothered WaHo hash browns better, particularly when you’re nursing the lingering malaise of a night of overindulgence, is a dollop of 57 Sauce.
And just when I thought things in the Pittsburgh-adjacent sauce cosmos couldn’t get any better, last year I discovered — at a Dollar Tree, of all things — Heinz Hot 57 Sauce with jalapeños. This, I think, will be my signature sauce for the coming year. Come to think of it, it kind of has to be.
So if you care about me at all (don’t feel obligated), you’ll take my word for it: There may be no sauce like hunger, but there’s no sauce like Heinz 57, either.
Happy birthday, Ted! Wish I had a pickle pin to send to you !
I’d like to live in the Pittsburgh-adjacent sauce cosmos. Embarrassed to say I’ve never had 57 sauce. And this is from somebody whose guilty pleasure is a soup bowl of ketchup and bread and butter pickles. It’s a late night thing… Yet, oddly, not a drunken thing.