Ketchup: The Sauce That Started Out as Medicine

Most people assume ketchup has always been the tomato-based American condiment in their fridge. But the word comes from the Hokkien Chinese "kê-tsiap," and for centuries the sauce had no tomatoes at all—British sailors encountered a fermented fish brine in Southeast Asian ports in the late 1600s, and English cookbooks soon featured ketchup recipes made from mushrooms, walnuts, or anchovies. When American farmers finally added tomatoes in the early 1800s, the nightshade family fruit was widely feared as poisonous, and early commercial ketchups spoiled fast, pushing makers to add coal tar dyes and benzoate of soda. Henry John Heinz, a Pittsburgh horseradish seller, changed that in 1876 with a preservative-free recipe bottled in clear glass so customers could see there was no chemical sludge inside. His made-up "57 Varieties" slogan, the slow-pour marketing war against cheaper brands in the 1970s, and a recipe still locked in a Pittsburgh vault are all part of how a former medicine became a global staple worth tens of billions.