Ketchup is a condiment whose very name conjures up images of tomatoes, hotdogs, burgers, and plastic Heinz-labeled bottles of tomato sauce. It is so widely associated as a condiment that upon searching for synonyms of “condiment” in the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “ketchup” appears as the fourth synonym. Although essentially synonymous with tomato sauce today, ketchup actually originated as a tomato-free sauce from imperial China. In fact, in a post titled “Ketchup” on his blog The Language of Food, Stanford University professor Daniel Jurafsky brings up an interesting question: why do the labels on bottles of ketchup, e.g., those on Heinz, indicate “tomato ketchup,” as it seems redundant? Obviously, it’s because ketchup did not always mean it came from tomatoes.
Professor Jurafsky traces ketchup’s predecessor to a fermented fish paste, originating from ancient China. Fermented food products in Asia date back to before 300 BC, and started out in southern China as thick pastes made of fermented fish or meat. Soon, vegetables such as soybeans began to be used for fermented pastes as well, leading to products such as soy sauce, and overtook fermented fish pastes in terms of usage. Eventually, these fermented products spread to southeast Asia, including Vietnam and Indonesia, where the opposite happened and fermented fish pastes became the more widely used condiment. Professor Jurafsky’s post includes a picture that indicates northeast Asia mainly using fermented beans, while southeast Asia mainly using fermented fish. The spread of this fermented fish was via Chinese traders and settlers, who mainly spoke Southern Min dialects originating in the Fujian province, such as Hokkien or Amoy. In these dialects, the sauce was called something like “ke-tchup,” “kôe-chiap,” or “kê-chiap.” Indeed, the original Chinese characters for this sauce would translate today to “brine of pickled fish or shell-fish”, or “fish/salmon sauce.”
In the 1600s, Dutch and English sailors encountered these fermented goods on their voyages through southeast Asia and brought them back home due to their well-preserved nature, where they were quickly introduced into English cookbooks and cuisines, and where their original recipe began its deviation into modern-day ketchup. One of the first mentions of ketchup in English recipes was in Eliza Smith’s 1758 cookbook The Compleat Housewife, which calls for anchovies, cloves, and ginger, and is described as “good to put into fifh fauce, or any favoury difh of meat; you may add to it the clear liquor that comes from mufhrooms.” Mushrooms especially became one of the key ingredients in ketchup in Britain, leading to mushroom ketchup, which is still mass-produced today. These ketchup recipes would come to America during Britain’s colonial period, although they would soon be altered again.
As the tomato is native to North America, tomato ketchup likely has its origins in America. In Andrew F. Smith’s book Pure Ketchup: A History of America’s National Condiment, with Recipes, he claims Mease to have “published the first known tomato ketchup recipe in 1812.” Smith also mentions that Mease wrote that “Love Apples,” a term for tomatoes back then, made for “a fine catsup,” the latter term an anglicization of the original Chinese word. However, tomatoes were thought back then to be poisonous, an idea brought over from Europe. It wasn’t until the mid 1800s, when tomatoes gained popularity, that tomato ketchup began to spread, and according to The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, by 1896, “the New York Tribune reported that tomato ketchup was America’s national condiment, available ‘on every table in the land’.” Ketchup’s popularity has since saw the rise of Heinz, Hunt’s, and a bunch of other tomato-based production companies, and has found its way into various foods and cuisines, often making them more appealing or popular because of its own popularity. Regardless, many people would still find surprising the non-American origins, from the name to the sauce itself, of America’s favorite condiment.
Sources:
- Butler, Stephanie. “Ketchup: A Saucy History.” History.com, 20 July 2012, https://www.history.com/news/hungry-history/ketchup-a-saucy-history.
- Gandhi, Lakshmi. “Ketchup: The All-American Condiment That Comes From Asia.” NPR, 3 Dec. 2013, https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/12/02/248195661/ketchup-the-all-american-condiment-that-comes-from-asia.
- Jurafsky, Daniel. “Ketchup.” The Language of Food, 2 Sept. 2009, https://languageoffood.blogspot.com/2009/09/ketchup.html.
- Smith, Andrew F. Pure Ketchup: A History of America’s National Condiment, with Recipes. University of South Carolina Press, 1996.
- Smith, Andrew F. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America. 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 2013.