Think ketchup originated in America? Well, despite the fact that 97% of American households have a bottle of the red stuff in their kitchens, this condiment actually started life on much more exotic shores. The word ketchup comes from a Hokkien Chinese word, ‘kê-tsiap’, which was the name of a sauce made from fermented fish. (While any food with the word ‘fermented’ in it just doesn’t sound appetising, I think this was actually quite similar to soy sauce.)
So how did ketchup migrate? Well, it’s likely that British travellers brought ‘kê-tsiap’ home, before attempting to recreate it in their kitchens and anglicising it as ‘catchup’ (also ‘catsup’). The first written mention of ‘catchup’ is in ‘A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew’, a dictionary of English slang first published in 1698. It has over 4,000 entries and, frankly, sounds awesome.
At some point ‘catchup’ mutated into ‘ketchup’. And the first published recipe for ketchup appeared in 1727, in ‘The Compleat Housewife’, an incredibly popular cookbook by Eliza Smith which went through a massive 18 editions. Ingredients in Smith’s recipe included anchovies, shallots, vinegar, ginger and nutmeg, and involved shaking the bottle once or twice a day for a week before using it. A second recipe for ‘ketchup in paste’ appeared in 1732, written by one Richard Bradley (who was the first professor of botany at Cambridge University, and also published the first recipe with pineapple in it – hopefully it wasn’t a pizza). This still wasn’t the ketchup we know today though – the main ingredient was red beans, and there definitely weren’t any tomatoes in there. Other versions followed, often containing mushrooms (apparently Jane Austen was a big fan of mushroom ketchup), unripe walnuts (YUM) and oysters. At this point ‘ketchup’ was really just another word for ‘sauce’.
Despite having been brought to England in the 1500s from South America, tomatoes weren’t popular as people actually thought they were poisonous (possibly due to the lead from lead pewter plates leaching into them). So it wasn’t until around 1812 that the first tomato ketchup recipe appeared. James Mease, a scientist from Philadelphia, gets the credit for this, although he loses points for calling tomatoes ‘love apples’ (due to their reputation for being an aphrodisiac – which seems somewhat at odds with the whole poison thing, but never mind), which doesn’t seem very scientific, and sounds gross. A little start-up by the name of Heinz then introduced their recipe in 1876, and the red sauce we know today was born. Today Heinz is the best-selling brand of ketchup in the United States, with more than 650 million bottles sold every year.
I still don’t like it though.