One of the world’s oldest condiments - Dan Kwartler
In the mid-18th century,
England was crazy for ketchup.
The sauce was a staple,
and countless cookbooks
encouraged adding ketchup
to stews, vegetables, and even desserts.
If these seem like odd places
for ketchup’s tangy tomato flavor,
that’s because this ketchup wasn’t the
ubiquitous red goop you’re thinking of.
In fact, this sweet and savory brown sauce
didn't even have tomatoes in it.
So where did this early ketchup come from?
And how did it become the dip
we know and love today?
To answer these questions,
we’ll need to turn to ketchup’s
condiment cousin: fish sauce.
As early as 300 BCE, Chinese fishermen
routinely caught batches of small fish
that were too plentiful
to eat all at once,
but too time consuming
to individually preserve.
So often, the day’s catch would be
salted and stored together.
Over several months,
the fish would ferment
as their internal enzymes broke
down their bodies’ proteins.
The result was a rich, salty liquid
which would be strained and stored
as fish sauce.
Chinese fishermen weren’t the only ones
to figure out this savory seasoning.
Ancient Greeks, and later the Romans
that conquered them,
built their entire cuisine
around fish sauce’s strong umami flavor.
The sauce, which they called garum,
traveled with every soldier
to the Empire’s front lines.
And they constructed dozens of fish sauce
factories throughout the Mediterranean,
each capable of producing thousands
of gallons of garum.
But when the Roman Empire collapsed,
so did their condiment business.
Most Europeans continued to cook without
fish sauce for a thousand years,
until the Dutch East India Company arrived
in Southeast Asia in the early 1600s.
The Dutch and English exploited
this region for countless goods,
including barrels of their most common
local condiment.
This familiar, fishy liquid
had many names,
including “ke-tsiap” and “koe-cheup.”
But upon arrival in British ports,
its title was bastardized into ketchup,
thus beginning Europe’s second wave
of fish sauce supremacy.
European ships supplied ketchup
throughout the Western Hemisphere
until they were kicked out of Asian
trade hubs in the mid-1700s.
But the public refused to let ketchup
go the way of garum.
A whole crop of British cookbooks emerged
with recipes for knockoff ketchups,
containing everything from oysters
and anchovies to mushrooms and walnuts.
Soon, ketchup became a catch-all name
for any brown sauce.
And this great ketchup hunt produced some
of England’s most enduring condiments,
including Worcestershire, A1,
and HP sauce.
But it was a chef across the Atlantic
who would introduce a new color
to the equation.
While tomatoes varied
in popularity across Europe,
American chefs were putting the New World
fruit in all kinds of dishes.
And in 1812, Philadelphian physician
and food hobbyist James Mease
debuted the first tomato-based ketchup—
a thin, watery concoction of tomato pulp,
spices, raw shallots, and brandy.
This was a far-cry from fish sauce,
but tomatoes have high levels
of glutamate—
the same chemical responsible
for fish sauce’s rich umami flavor.
And Mease’s timing was perfect.
The back half of the 1800s
saw a surge in bottled foods,
and tomato ketchup was adopted
by several burgeoning bottle businesses.
By the 1870s, most tomato ketchups
had dropped the shallots and brandy
for sugar, salt, and sodium benzoate—
a questionable preservative
found in most bottled foods.
But the most important change
to this recipe was yet to come.
After a slow start selling
pickled vegetables,
Henry J. Heinz began selling
a wide variety of popular ketchups.
And at the turn of the 20th century,
his desire to use healthier,
natural ingredients
led Heinz to swap the sodium benzoate
for riper tomatoes
and a huge amount of vinegar.
The resulting thick, goopy formula
was an instant best seller—
despite being much harder
to get out of the bottle.
Over the 20th century,
this salty red sauce covered the globe—
pairing perfectly with the ambassadors
of American cuisine.
Today, 90% of American households
have ketchup in their kitchens,
and Heinz’s recipe has
even become the base
for dozens of other sauces and dressings—
all descendants of the same
fishy family tree.
