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Ketchup
Appears in
By Alastair Little and Richard Whittington
Published 1998
The original ketchup was almost certainly of the soy or Southeast Asian fish variety. The word ketchup comes from a Malay word and kecap or ketjap manis, a thick Indonesian soy sauce sweetened with palm sugar, is still an essential ingredient in Malay cooking, as is the thinner saltier kecap masin.
In eighteenth-century England, the first catchups or catsups were thin, vinegar-based sauces and were typically flavoured with oysters, mushrooms, anchovies or walnuts. The most common thin sauce sold today with the qualities of the early catchups is Worcestershire sauce. The thick sweet tomato ketchup which became hugely successful internationally in this century – mostly as an accompaniment to convenience food – is based on an eighteenth-century New England recipe.