Ketchup

Three tomatoes are walking down the street — a poppa tomato, a momma tomato, and a little baby tomato. Baby tomato starts lagging behind. Poppa tomato gets angry, goes over to the baby tomato, and squishes him… and says, ‘Ketchup.’

Although we closely associate ketchup with tomatoes these days, ketchup was around for hundreds of years before tomatoes were introduced. And, we also associate ketchup with being an iconic American condiments when in fact, it isn’t even American. It’s Asian.

The origins of ketchup extends back to the early 16th century, when British settlers in Fuji were introduced to a sauce used by Chinese sailors called ke-tchup. Local recipes for ke-tchup varied, but the first recipe on record dates back to 544 A.D. and instructs any prospective condiment maker to “take the intestine, stomach, and bladder of the yellow fish, shark and mullet, and wash them well. Mix them with a moderate amount of salt and place them in a jar. Seal tightly and incubate in the sun. It will be ready in twenty days in summer, fifty days in spring or fall and a hundred days in winter.”

By the time the British discovered ke-tchup, the recipe had been simplified into a pungent, amber-colored liquid made out of salted and fermented anchovies. In a very real way, the original ketchup wasn’t ketchup at all. It was fish sauce, pretty much identical to the fish sauce you can buy by the bottle in any Asian supermarket. When British traders headed back to England with a taste for the sauce, they attempted to re-create it, Anglicizing it with the addition of (what else?) beer. Eventually, anchovies were taken out of the sauce entirely and replaced with walnut ketchup (Jane Austen’s favorite kind) and mushroom ketchup (which tastes similar to Worcestershire sauce).

In fact, even as they experimented with every other variety, the English enjoyed ketchup for close to 200 years before anyone thought of adding a tomato in the mix. The resistance to tomato ketchup can largely be chalked up to the widespread misconception among Europeans that tomatoes, which looked nearly identical to deadly nightshade berries, were poisonous. Tomatoes were largely considered an ornamental curiosity for gardens ever since Cortez had brought them back from the Americas in the 1500s, but they weren’t meant to be eaten.

Despite its status as a native fruit, Americans inherited Europe’s aversion to tomatoes. There were, of course, tomato advocates. In 1820, Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson of Salem, New Jersey, stood on the steps of the local courthouse and consumed an entire basket of tomatoes to prove they weren’t poisonous. By and large, though, it wasn’t until the 1830s that America got hip to the fact that tomatoes could be delicious. In 1834, an Ohio physician named Dr. John Cook Bennett declared tomatoes to be a universal panacea that could be used to treat diarrhea, violent bilious attacks, and indigestion. Pretty soon, Bennett was publishing recipes for tomato ketchup, which were then concentrated into pill form and sold as a patent medicine across the country.

By 1876, tomatoes had undergone a remarkable turnaround in the court of public opinion. Tomato ketchup was not only popular, but because of the teachings of an influential quack promulgated by the patent medicine trade, tomato ketchup was actually considered to be a sort of tonic, a condiment that was actually healthier than normal ketchup.