KETCHUP
The sauce that is today called ketchup (or catsup) in Western cultures is a tomato-based sauce that is quite distinct from the Eastern ancestors of this product. A sauce called ke-tiap was in use in China at least as early as the seventeenth century, but the Chinese version
of the sauce was made of pickled fish, shellfish, and spices. The popularity of this Chinese sauce spread to Singapore and Malaysia, where it was called kechap. The Indonesian sauce ketjab derives its name from the same source as the Malaysian sauce but is made from very different ingredients. The Indonesian ketjab is made by cooking black soy beans, fermenting them, placing them in a salt brine for at least a week, cooking the resulting solution further, and sweetening it heavily; this process results in a dark, thick, and sweet variation of soy sauce.
Early in the eighteenth century, sailors from the British navy came across this exotic sauce on voyages to Malaysia and Singapore and brought samples of it back to England on return voyages. English chefs tried to recreate the sauce but were unable to do so exactly because key ingredients were unknown or unavailable in England; chefs ended up substituting ingredients such as mushrooms and walnuts in an attempt to recreate the special taste of the original Asian sauce. Variations of this sauce became quite the rage in eighteenth-century England, appearing in a number of recipe books and featured as an exotic addition to menus from the period.
The English version did not contain tomatoes, and it was not until the end of the eighteenth century that tomatoes became a main ingredient, in the ketchup of trie newly created United States. It is quite notable that tomatoes were added to the sauce in that tomatoes had previously been considered quite dangerous to health. The tomato had been cultivated by the Aztecs, who had called it tomatl; however, early botanists had recognized that the tomato was a member of the Solanacaea family, which does include a number of poisonous plants. The leaves of the tomato plant are poisonous, though of course the fruit is not.
(1) Thomas Jefferson, who cultivated the tomato in his gardens at Monticello and served dishes containing tomatoes at lavish feasts, often receives credit for changing the reputation of the tomato. (2) Soon after Jefferson had introduced the tomato to American society, recipes combining the newly fashionable tomato with the equally fashionable and exotic sauce known as ketchap began to appear. (3) By the middle of the nineteenth century, both the tomato and tomato ketchup were staples of the American kitchen. (4)
Tomato ketchup, popular though it was, was quite time-consuming to prepare. In 1876, the first mass produced tomato ketchup, a product of German-American Henry Heinz, went on sale and achieved immediate success. From tomato ketchup, Heinz branched out into a number of other products, including various sauces, pickles, and relishes. By 1890, his company had expanded to include sixty-five different products but was in need of a marketing slogan. Heinz settled on the slogan “57 Varieties” because he liked the way that the digits 5 and 7 looked in print in spite of the fact that this slogan understated the number of products that he had at the time.