Ketchup began as fish brine and mushrooms long before tomatoes
For its first century in English, ketchup rarely involved tomatoes. British cooks made it from mushrooms, and other recipes used oysters, walnuts or grapes. The word itself may trace back to a southern Chinese term for pickled-fish brine, and the first tomato version was only published in 1812.
Nobody is certain where the word comes from. One strong candidate is Hokkien, spoken along the coast of Fujian, where kôe-chiap meant the salty liquid from pickled fish or shellfish; an 1873 Amoy dictionary defines it exactly that way. Another route runs through the Malay kicap, originally soy sauce, itself borrowed from Chinese. A popular story that it simply means tomato sauce in Cantonese is considered a folk etymology. A rival theory links it to escabeche, a pickling sauce whose roots some historians trace to Arabic.
In English the word appears from 1682, followed by catchup in 1690 and catsup in 1730. From the 1600s the British version was built on mushrooms, and colonists in the Thirteen Colonies were making mushroom ketchup by at least 1770. Early recipes in British and American cookbooks through the 18th century covered many varieties.
Tomatoes arrived slowly. James Mease printed the first known tomato recipe in 1812; an 1817 version added anchovies and cochineal, an insect used for red dye. Mary Randolph, a cousin of Thomas Jefferson, included one in The Virginia Housewife in 1824. Farmers sold it locally until Jonas Yerkes began bottling it, and by 1837 he was distributing it across the country. Anchovies had disappeared from recipes by the mid-1850s, American cooks started adding sugar, and by 1897 the Sears catalogue grumbled that hundreds of brands existed, few of them any good.
Oddly, tomato ketchup caught on before fresh tomatoes did. Many Americans were wary of the raw fruit but happy to eat it once it had been cooked down with vinegar and spices. Today's standard mix is tomatoes, sugar and vinegar, seasoned with things like onion, allspice, cloves and garlic. Southern US states and Mexico often still say catsup, while Britons may call a similar sauce tomato sauce.
Source: Ketchup
