Playing Historical Ketchup

Nixon inexplicably poured it on cottage cheese. Reagan considered it a vegetable. It’s a friend of burgers and fries everywhere—albeit foe (at least in Chicago...) to otherwise condiment-happy hot dogs. Baskin Robbins even tried an ice cream back in the 1970s, perhaps lending some stripe of convoluted logic to my youthful practice of dipping hot, salty-crisp fries into cool, creamy-sweet vanilla milkshakes...

Ketchup. Who would have thought an Asian sauce based on pickled fish would, over centuries, morph into the thick, tomato-rich product that now sits on nearly every American refrigerator door?

A reference from “A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew” (circa 1698) calls “catchup” a “high East India sauce,” likely referencing Indonesian kecap manis—spelled “ketjap manis” by the Dutch—a thick, complex, caramely concoction similar to soy sauce. In Malaysia, it was known as kêchap, and “The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink” cites the Mandarin word as k-tsiap—both likely versions of spicy, pickled-fish and fermented-soybean sauce transported west by British sailors, whose countrymen soon finagled their own iteration based on mushrooms since the Union Jack didn’t fly over soybean fields in those days.

Elizabeth Smith reputedly published the earliest ketchup recipe, based on anchovies, in 1727’s “The Compleat Housewife.” Dr. William Kitchiner’s renowned 1829 British cookbook “Apicius Redivivus, or the Cook’s Oracle,” includes recipes for several “catchups”; the Mushroom Catchup is key to his famous Wow Wow Sauce for Stewed or Bouilli Beef (No. 328).

Colonists had long since carried the ketchup legacy over the Atlantic. In 1801, Mrs. Samuel Whitehorne released her “Sugar House Book,” which includes a recipe for Tomato Ketchup. Another for Love Apple Catsup hit print in 1812, courtesy of an American ex-pat living in Nova Scotia by the name of James Mease. “The Virginia House-wife,” an 1824 cookbook from early-American aristocrat Mary Randolph (Thomas Jefferson’s cousin) also includes a recipe for ketchup.

In 1837, Jonas Yerkes sold American consumers bottled ketchup, made from byproducts of tomato canning. The Heinz family took that ball and ran with it, and in 1876 released their higher-quality version of tomato ketchup, proclaiming it “Blessed relief for Mother and the other women in the household!” (Several years down the road, Heinz would switch to using purely ripe tomatoes and boost ketchup’s tomato-solids content, thereby creating the umami-rich, thick, thixotropic product common today.) By 1896, the New York Tribune dubbed ketchup America’s national condiment, and 1901 found 94 brands of ketchup for sale in Connecticut, with 800 different manufactured types documented by 1915.

Although historical versions centered on pickled fish, mushrooms, walnuts or myriad other foodstuffs, these days, anything labeled “ketchup,” “catsup” or even “catchup” must meet the standard of identity carved into federal stone via Title 21, Part 155, Section 194 of the Code of Federal Regulations, which firmly ties the condiment to tomatoes.

Deceptively simple in its ubiquity, modern ketchup embodies nearly perfect culinary balance via its simultaneous triggering of sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami tastes.

And burgers and fries the world over have never been the same since.