The well-traveled ketchup

That divine sauce required for french fries and barbecues has a long and exotic history that doesn’t involve tomatoes.

The first documented ketchup recipe came from southern China in 300 B.C., where salty sauces made from fermented fish were called, roughly, koe-cheup or ge-thcup in the Southern Min Dialect.

Westerners didn’t get to sample the sauce until about 1600, when sailors and British traders who traveled along the Silk Road took samples back home, according to History.com. The sauces lasted a long time and were easy to transport.

The problem with the Chinese version of ketchup is that the required ingredients weren’t always found in the West. So they improvised. By the 18th century, cookbooks offered recipes with oysters, mushrooms, walnuts, celery, and fruits. But not tomatoes, which were thought to be poisonous for some time, and later considered an aphrodisiac.

It wasn’t until 1812 that tomato-based ketchup debuted. In 1876, the Heinz company produced tomato ketchup that contained vinegar to prevent spoiling. The company still sells 650 million bottles a year.

Is it ketchup or catsup?
Either is correct — both are a corrupted version of the name of the Chinese sauce. You can blame the Heinz company for any confusion. They started out calling their sauce catsup and later changed it to ketchup.