Interesting. I’ve always though of a Spanish torta as the potato omlette but it appears it is better known as a tortilla.
It sort of reminds me of punch. It could be referring to a beverage but more likely means a strike with a fist or similar mechanical device or operation.
I’ve eaten at a lot of Thai restaurants, and eaten a lot of Pad Thai at them, and I can’t say I’ve ever had a tomato/ketchup based sauce. Usually they’re made of lemon/lime juice or vinegar, soy sauce, fish sauce, sugar of some kind and tamarind concentrate, which is what gives it that brown color and along with the fish sauce, the distinctive taste.
Funny you should mention ketchup: I’m 65 now, but still cling to some of my supposedly “fussy” juvenile culinary aversions. So I’m the only member of my family who dislikes stinky mustard, and always puts ketchup on my hot dogs.
If you can chew and slurp at the same time, you won’t need a fork to mitigate ketchup spills.
FWIW, my baby of the family contrariness might also account for my contempt for would-be food authority control freaks, whether professional or amateurs-- including my two older siblings-- who lecture about the Proper or Approved way to consume foodstuffs.
I admit I may be permanently warped by childhood food criticism. I live alone, and once a week or so buy a delicious cinnamon roll for breakfast. I add raisins and warm it up; when I perform the final step of loading it up with an obscene amount of butter (spread), I always savor the fact that there’s no one around to either say with genuine disapproving alarm, “Do you need all that butter?” or snarkily ask if I like a little cinnamon roll with my butter.
Also, banana ketchup is popular in the Caribbean and the Philippines. Both products linked below have 4+ star reviews on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Baron-Banana-Ketchup-14-Ounce/dp/B0019BCQ56?th=1
https://www.amazon.com/UFC-Banana-Catsup-Tamis-Anghang-1kg/dp/B00C3AVAIG/ref=sr_1_9?dchild=1&keywords=banana+ketchup&qid=1588212661&sr=8-9
Jesus, it looks like meconium :eek:
The first time I saw it I was out with a friend and we went to a “authentic” Thai restaurant he loved. Based on his reco I ordered the “authentic” pad thai. It was made with a ketchup. WTF?? Although he’d never been, he insisted it was how they made it in Thailand.
The people working there looked Chinese so I said something to them in mandarin and they gave me a sly smile and responded back in Mandarin. They used to run a Chinese restaurant and just changed it to Thai to jump on the bandwagon by tweaking the recipes a little.
From what I’ve read it’s a big city N.Anerican thing.
If you google “does pad thai have ketchup” you will see some recipes and many comments. Here’s one:
Here in Panama is the only place I know where it it typical to put ketchup on Chinese food. The biggest Chinese chain, Don Lee, puts both packets of soy sauce (salsa china) and ketchup in with your take-out order. It’s especially odd since the first Chinese immigrants came in the 1850s, and a fairly large percentage of Panamanians have Chinese ancestry.
I’ve had it. It’s a thin, salty sauce with a bit of a tang. It’s good. But it’s close enough to Worcestershire sauce that I don’t feel the need to keep another bottle around. Worth trying though.
That was done in an unnecessarily graphic manner.
We can certainly get it in the UK, I always have a bottle in the store cupboard.
That sounds like my Polish-American mother’s recipe for Chop Suey, minus the crispy noodles, and usually with beef instead of chicken.
Back then, the canned bean sprouts was my favorite part. Now, I wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot Pole. Which would be equivalent to two of my mother. 
Polenta is normally made with a medium-ground cornmeal. If you want a corn-starch made from maize, look for “gluten free” corn starch. Not that wheat starch has much gluten in it, but it’s a selling point.
I don’t know what’s in that tub, but no, when I’ve made it, and when I’ve had commercial versions, it looked like any other brown/black liquid sauce - L&P, HP, Henderson’s. Salty *umami *liquid.
What’s in that tub looks like what’s left behind when you strain off the ketchup.
Don’t ever watch someone make duxelles for Beef Wellington, if that’s your first association.