The sauce that is today called ketc

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 as 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 ketjap 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 the 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 to 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.
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. 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 ketchup
began to appear. By the middle of the nineteenth
century, both the tomato and tomato ketchup
were staples of the American kitchen.
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.