The chances are that when you think of ketchup it’s a thick tomato sauce – a store-cupboard staple – that goes particularly well with Friday night’s fish and chips or slathered on an American-style hamburger.
As you might suspect, this type of ketchup is a relatively modern invention. Although tomatoes were first domesticated in what is now Mexico and transported to Europe following Spanish colonisation in the 1500s, they took a few hundred years to be fully incorporated into local cuisines. In fact, tomato ketchup wasn’t sold commercially until the mid-19th century, with the famous Heinz brand only launching in Pennsylvania in 1876.
The original ‘ketchup’ actually hails from south-east Asia, where it started life as a salty, fermented, fish sauce. Variously known as ‘catsup’, ‘catchup’ or ‘kitchup’, the name most likely comes from the Chinese word kôe-chiap, which was used to refer to the brine of pickled fish as far back as the sixth century AD. The first English-language recipes date from the 17th century, when British travellers and sailors encountered the sauce in the far east and were inspired to create their own versions back at home.
The earliest British ketchups were typically made using anchovies, walnuts, oysters or mushrooms spiced with ginger, cloves and pepper in a salty, vinegary or alcoholic brine. By the Victorian era, the mushroom version was especially popular: mushrooms grew abundantly in Britain, making it an easy, flavourful and long-lasting sauce to add to meats and gravies. More salty than sugary – and a lot thinner than the modern-day ketchups – it was more akin to Worcestershire sauce.
To create mushroom ketchup, the mushrooms were first salted to extract some of the moisture (and act as a preservative), before being squeezed and heated to draw out the remaining liquor. Once that was done, the liquid was then boiled with spices and strained into bottles.
This is essentially the method in the mushroom ketchup recipe I have included on the right, which is based on a recipe from a 1747 book by the English cookery writer Hannah Glasse. According to Glasse, the sauce could “keep two years” – although, to be on the safe side, I wouldn’t keep it for longer than a couple of months!
Interestingly, there is a recipe for another type of ketchup (or ‘catchup’) in the same cookbook that could supposedly be stored for up to 20 years, as it was intended for the captains of ships travelling on long voyages overseas. Indeed, the existence of ketchup is evidence of the globalisation and colonisation that marked the early modern period – historical processes that continue to shape our modern-day food system and societies around the world.
