Ketchup Was a Fish Sauce Before It Met a Tomato

Ketchup today means a sweet, thick tomato sauce. For most of its history it meant nothing of the kind. The word came from a fermented fish sauce of southern China and south-east Asia; English cooks made versions with mushrooms, walnuts and oysters, and tomatoes only became standard in the nineteenth century.

• A thick tomato condiment. *Chips with ketchup.*
• Any thick sauce (historical). *Mushroom ketchup.*
• Catsup — an older American spelling. *A bottle of catsup.*

Word forms

How it is used in a sentence

• There is ketchup on the table.Uncountable.
• Mushroom ketchup was common in Victorian kitchens.A dark savoury sauce, still made.
• American labels once said catsup.The spelling has largely died out.

Sauces on the same shelf

• Ketchup — sweet and sharp, tomato based
• Brown sauce — British, made with fruit and vinegar
• Worcestershire sauce — fermented, and it does contain anchovies
• Sriracha — chilli and garlic, from Thailand
• Passata — sieved tomatoes, an ingredient rather than a condiment

Probably from Hokkien Chinese *kê-tsiap*, a brine of pickled fish, borrowed through Malay. English recipes for ketchup appear from the eighteenth century, none of them with tomatoes in the earliest versions.