I have a tendency to turn up my nose a little at the various non-ketchup ketchups that are available in the market. When ketchup companies come out with versions that are sweet and sour, hot and spicy or similar, I am unimpressed. I shun these products. I am a ketchup purist.
Unfortunately, this particular snobbery is one that cannot in any way be justified. It’s hard to trace any sort of pedigree for ketchup. For one thing, it’s been around a lot longer than people realise. If I’d ever thought about it, I’d have assumed it was a fairly recent addition to the world’s foodstuffs. Apparently this is not the case; the word has existed in the English language since at least the beginning of the 1700s (as “ketchup”, “catsup”, and a few other different spellings).
The word itself has no definite etymology either. There are theories according to which it is based on Chinese words for either “pickled fish” or “aubergine sauce”. There’s a Malay word for “fish sauce” that also sounds similar, but that might be derived from the Chinese as well. Or there’s a French word which means food in a sauce that sounds a bit like ketchup. It was anglicised to “caveach” at about the same time as “ketchup” entered the language, and can be traced back to an Arabic word for the process of pickling something in vinegar. But no one is sure about any of this. It will be equally obvious that in all of this long history of ketchup and its predecessors, tomatoes are nowhere to be found.
This is understandable: tomatoes originally came from South America (the name comes from an Aztec word meaning “swelling fruit”) and were not known to the rest of the world until the Spanish colonised the area and spread the new plant. Even then, tomatoes were not immediately accepted, as they were believed to be poisonous. (Since tomatoes are members of the same family of plants as the deadly nightshade, this wasn’t actually a particularly stupid thing to believe).
Weirdly enough, the French name for tomatoes is “pomme d’amour”, or “love apple”. There’s a story that suggests that this name came about not because of any aphrodisiacal properties that the tomato might possess, but because the Italian name “pomo d’Moro” (apple of the Spanish/Moors, named after the fruit’s chief distributors) was misheard by a Frenchman.
So if ketchup wasn’t always made out of tomatoes, what was it made out of? The word has signified different things at different times. In Dr Johnson’s dictionary it figures as a pickle made from mushrooms, but other recipes have walnuts, cucumbers, and other strange ingredients.
Which means we have here a word that doesn’t have any clear origins, and it doesn’t have a constant meaning either. Even today, it is possible across large parts of Asia to buy and use “banana ketchup”, which I’m reliably informed is slightly sweeter than the tomato variety, and quite tasty. In the face of all this instability of meaning, it’s impossible to be a purist.
This doesn’t, of course, mean that I’m reconciled to modern ketchup hybrids. But at least now I’m aware that my disdain is illogical.
— bluelullaby@gmail.com