Gastrodome: K Is For Ketchup
Monday's Child Is Fair of Face
Since the basic argument came up last week in talking about family farms versus industrial agriculture, let me extend the case against efficiency by talking about ketchup.
No argument about the efficient supply of calories and nutrition to the largest number of people can be made to include ketchup, the Reagan Administration’s attempt to define it as a vegetable notwithstanding. It’s a condiment. You don’t need to eat it, but nevertheless most of us would feel the absence of ketchup if it were no longer available. Despite the fact that the industrially-produced norm with ketchup that is most closely associated with the Heinz Company (now Kraft Heinz, after a 2015 merger) could be a lot more interesting than it is.
That’s true for a lot of industrial condiments made for late 20th Century American consumers. There’s a sort of structure-agency question about something like ketchup or other dominant brands like Hellman’s Mayonnaise. Are they relatively bland and often tilted towards sweetness because that’s the most stable and reliable mass produced version arrived at over decades of adjustments since the late 19th Century (with consumers adapting to the taste to the point of not wanting alternatives) or is the taste the preference that the company has adapted to meet?
In the case of ketchup, this question drives straight back into its somewhat murky history. The word itself appears in English for the first time in the late 17th Century, which in food history is something of a big hint that there’s some association between European expansion and the new food word. In this case, there are rival theories about the etymology of “catsup” or “ketchup” that all feel kind of messy to me as I read them. Andrew Smith, in his book on ketchup and its history, describes the various theories1:
It’s a 17th Century French gastronomical writer who invented it. Smith points out that this theory is the invention of a pseudonymous British author and there’s no supporting evidence for it. Rule that one out.
Elizabeth David asserts it is derived from a European word for a vinegar-pickle condiment that others have connected to escabeche, which may in turn be derived from Arabic. I have to say that without reading David’s original, I wonder whether that isn’t also simply asserted rather than proven. David was not a scholar of food history and her frame of reference was entirely Mediterranean and Western European—I can’t imagine how she would have evaluated that theory in comparison to origins that have ketchup coming from somewhere else in the world.
On the other hand, the “other” origins all have their issues. Smith points out that an early argument that ketchup was Japanese seems to have been a misspelling of “Javanese”, which makes sense anyway since a Japanese condiment coming into English usage in the late 17th Century doesn’t make much sense, compared to it coming from the East Indies via Dutch merchants and circulating to England. But Malay etymologists, says Smith, feel that the word can’t be of Malay origin, but is Chinese instead. That doesn’t necessarily rule out the condiment coming from Indonesia, which most of the etymologies don’t seem to discuss. E.g., there’s been a merchant diaspora in Indonesia from southeastern China for six centuries, since before the Dutch and Portuguese came there. (Though apparently the 19th Century French orientalist Terrien de la Couperie picked up on this point, according to Smith.)
As a further complication, though, the advocates of Chinese language origin for the word and the condiment disagree about whether it was just a vinegar-fish-ferment mixture or more specifically that it was about a condiment that had tomato in it. As Smith relays it, that comes from Craig Clairborne, who I think is likely even less reliable than David as an initial source for the claim. Smith cites the work of E.N. Anderson to point out that tomatoes are latecomers to Chinese cuisine—which I would argue makes them precisely the kind of food that people like to confabulate into histories that take some recent dietary and imagine it as old and indigenized.
As an aside, I have to say that food history teaches you that etymological reference works are often bizarrely confident and declarative about derived word histories that turn out to be really dodgy once you look into them. I looked up ketchup in a number of etymological references and got one that said it is Malay, period, no debate, and another that said it is Chinese, period, no other theories even need considering (and it erases the different theories about Chinese origin, amalgamating them together). I would guess that one problem with etymology that applies with special force to English is that words whose origins are from non-European languages are sometimes weakly evaluated by scholars who only speak English (or also French and Latin) and who only know English history.
Anyway, the point about tomatoes as a late arrival applies to ketchup in Anglo-American usage as well. The 18th and 19th Century versions we know about didn’t have tomatoes as a major ingredient. This is the thing about tomatoes generally, which maybe I’ll write about more when I get to the letter “T”: aside from Native American diets, they’re relative newcomers to all other global cuisines, despite their current ubiquity. Until the mid-19th Century, ketchup in the US and the UK didn’t have tomatoes either. Nor did they have industrial food preparation, and that’s the point of ketchup in its pre-tomato, pre-Heinz form. It was a way to preserve the value and flavor of the foods added to it—mushrooms, dried fish, peppers—in vinegar. Vinegar was the world’s refrigerator a long time before the Industrial Revolution. The daily diet for most people in the world, even now, is a stodge made of grain, rice or starchy tuber. Those are filling and variously nutritious but one thing they’re not is full of flavor. So in the deeper history of human life, while you wouldn’t die without condiments, you might feel less alive.
Which, to come full circle, is why I would say the familiar Heinz version is less interesting than it could be. Because it has been something else. But then again, why should it be something other than what it is now? It’s cheap, it’s everywhere, and it’s pretty good for what it is, as far as mass produced food goes.
I might feel differently if ketchup was all there was, but even in diners and fast food joints, there’s often more to be had in the U.S. of 2026. You can dip your fries in mayo, in hot sauces, in soy sauce. You can buy relishes, chili crisps, fermented pastes, speciality vinegars. And if you want to, you can find non-Heinz ketchups. Some also mass-produced, either to be less sweet or to be gluten-free or otherwise safe or appropriate to restricted diets. Some as upmarket variants with more distinctive vinegar components, more spice, heirloom tomato varieties. Or banana-based ketchup, popular in the Phillipines, sometimes colored red so that it looks like tomato ketchup. You can make ketchup yourself pretty easily, in several different styles, according to your preferences.
That might all be what my colleague Barry Schwartz would regard as too much choice. I think of it a bit as a culinary archipelago. There’s Heinz as the big island, safe and everywhere. There are far islands only glimpsed at the horizon, where if you travel to them you find you’ve gone from the Ketchup Islands to the Nam Pla Islands, into the lands of Ferment. There are nearby small islands a lot like Heinz but you have them more to yourself, and a few weird and interesting places in the chain. It’s all good. Whatever we lost in an era where mass production drove our palates into the monotony of efficiency, we’ve regained not just with expensive alternatives but with a better understanding of what something like ketchup is in our diets, and what might satisfy our desire for flavor besides that one affordable thing.
Image credit: Photo by Dennis Klein on Unsplash
Smith, Andrew F. Pure Ketchup : A History of America’s National Condiment, with Recipes. University of South Carolina Press, 1996.