Long before ketchup was made of sweet tomatoes, it was a fermented fish sauce from Southern China. In the 17th century, British traders in Southeast Asia encountered a salty, dark sauce called 鮭汁 (kôe-chiap, pronounced "kway-chee-up" in the Hokkien dialect). They loved it so much they brought the recipe home, eventually substituting tomatoes for the fish.
The Hokkien Roots of a Global Word
The word 'ketchup' traces its ancestry to the maritime trade routes of Southern China and Southeast Asia. Linguists and culinary historians generally trace the English term back to the Hokkien Chinese dialect, spoken in the coastal province of Fujian and across widespread trading ports in the region. In Southern Min dialects, words rendered as kê-chiap or kôe-chiap (鮭汁) referred to the brine of pickled fish or shellfish. The first character historically referred to a type of preserved fish or fish paste, while the second character signified sauce, juice, or broth.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, British, Dutch, and Portuguese sailors traded heavily in Southeast Asian ports such as Malacca, Batavia, and Canton. European merchants encountered local condiments that provided an intense, savory seasoning capable of preserving food and enhancing the plain rations of long maritime voyages. Recognizing the utility and flavor of these fermented sauces, Western sailors purchased jugs of the local concoction, adopting an anglicized phonetic approximation of the dialect term into their ship logs and vocabularies.
The Original Asian Fish and Soy Ferments
Unlike the thick, bright-red, sugar-laden condiment associated with modern diners, the original Asian sauces bearing related names were thin, salty, dark-brown liquids. In ancient Chinese culinary traditions dating back over two millennia, fermentation was a vital technique for preserving meats, fish, and legumes. Salted fish guts, whole fish, and soybeans were packed into earthenware jars and left to ferment under the sun, yielding a rich liquid teeming with amino acids.
Over centuries, these early sauces evolved into diverse condiments across East and Southeast Asia. The term diffused through regional languages, intertwining with words such as the Indonesian 'kecap', which eventually came to designate fermented soy sauces, including the sweet, molasses-like kecap manis. The common denominator among all these ancestral sauces was not tomatoes, but the deep umami flavor created by microbial fermentation and high salt concentrations.
The British Replicas: Mushrooms and Walnuts
When British sailors and travelers returned home without access to the specific fermented fish bases or local Asian ingredients, domestic cooks attempted to recreate the rich, savory qualities of the condiment using local British staples. Eighteenth-century English cookbooks began publishing recipes for sauces labeled 'catchup', 'ketchup', or 'catsup', relying on ingredients naturally rich in savory compounds.
Mushroom ketchup quickly became the dominant variety in Great Britain throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Recipes directed cooks to layer fresh field mushrooms with heavy amounts of salt to draw out their juices, which were then boiled down with spices like mace, cloves, nutmeg, allspice, and black pepper into a thin, dark liquid. Another widely popular variation was pickled walnut ketchup, made by crushing green, immature walnuts and boiling them in spiced brine. These thin liquid extracts were not dipped onto foods as modern ketchup is, but were instead splashed as concentrated seasoning into gravies, stews, roasted meats, and meat pies.
The American Shift to Tomatoes
Tomatoes belong to the nightshade family and were long viewed with suspicion in Northern Europe and North America, frequently grown as purely ornamental plants due to lingering fears that their fruit was toxic. As culinary attitudes toward tomatoes softened around the turn of the nineteenth century, American cooks began experimenting with adding them to the traditional spiced vinegar and salt bases used for ketchups.
The earliest known published recipe for tomato ketchup appeared in 1812, written by the American scientist and horticulturist James Mease of Philadelphia. Mease's recipe called for tomato pulp, spices, and brandy, while omitting sugar entirely. In this early era, tomato ketchup remained a seasonal, homemade preparation with a relatively thin consistency. Because tomatoes possess natural acids and flavors that paired well with vinegar, salt, and spices, tomato-based recipes steadily overtook mushroom, walnut, and oyster versions across North American kitchens.
Industrial Bottling and the Pure Food Revolution
The commercialization of tomato ketchup in the mid-nineteenth century introduced severe preservation challenges. Early industrial producers frequently struggled with rapid spoilage, bacterial fermentation, and mold in their bottled products. To cut costs and extend shelf life, some manufacturers used leftover tomato trimmings, artificial red colorings, and chemical preservatives such as sodium benzoate, which drew increasing criticism from food safety advocates.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, food safety pioneers like Harvey Washington Wiley campaigned against chemical preservatives. The H. J. Heinz Company revolutionized the industry by proving that tomato ketchup could be preserved entirely naturally through formula adjustments. By using ripe, whole tomatoes—which contain natural pectin—and significantly increasing the concentrations of distilled vinegar and sugar, Heinz created a thicker, shelf-stable, and sweeter condiment. This formulation set the commercial standard for modern tomato ketchup, solidifying the thick, red condiment that came to dominate the global market.
Spelling Wars and Global Variations
The translation of the original Chinese term into the Latin alphabet generated varied spellings that competed for dominance over centuries. In the English-speaking world, 'ketchup', 'catsup', and 'catchup' were used interchangeably for generations. The spelling 'catsup' was widely favored in parts of the United States throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, popularized by competing regional brands, while 'ketchup' became the international standard largely through the global reach and advertising power of major industrial producers.
Meanwhile, ketchup continued to evolve in different cultures based on agricultural realities and local palates. In the Philippines during World War II, a severe shortage of tomatoes combined with an abundance of bananas led food technologist Maria Orosa to develop banana ketchup, made from mashed bananas, vinegar, sugar, and spices, tinted red with food coloring. Today, whether in the form of Philippine banana ketchup, German currywurst ketchup, or sweet Indonesian kecap, the word remains a testament to centuries of culinary adaptation spanning continents and maritime trading networks.
Key takeaways
•The word 'ketchup' originated from the Hokkien Chinese term 'kôe-chiap' or 'kê-chiap', meaning the brine of fermented fish or shellfish.
•Before tomatoes were introduced to the recipe in the nineteenth century, British ketchups were dark, thin seasoning liquids made predominantly from salted mushrooms, green walnuts, or anchovies.
•The modern thick, sweet, and shelf-stable tomato ketchup was popularized in the late nineteenth century as industrial producers used ripe tomatoes, vinegar, and sugar to preserve the sauce without artificial chemicals.
•Global variations like Indonesian 'kecap' and Philippine banana ketchup reflect how regional trade and ingredient availability continued to reshape the sauce after its initial voyage.