Who invented tomato ketchup

I had twenty pounds of red fruit gleaming on my kitchen table. I canned most of them to use in sauces and soups for the winter, but I had an inkling to try something different. I started to think about ketchup as method of preservation just as Americans had considered the sauce in the 19th century. My friends thought I was crazy when I told them I was making ketchup. The flavors, he went on, were impossible to reproduce.

There was a reason everyone bought commercial ketchup, he insisted, because any attempt to prepare a homemade version was futile. Fortunately, I love a challenge. One of the first recipes Henry Heinz used back in the day contained allspice, cloves, cayenne pepper, mace, and cinnamon. A second included pepper, ginger, mustard seed, celery salt, horseradish, and brown sugar.

The recipe I tested includes similar ingredients. While I admit my end result tastes nothing like Heinz that rich texture is hard to achieve , it is still quite delicious.

More savory than sweet, it packs a bit of heat that mellows with time after canning. Today, the world of condiments is metamorphosing with the rise of alternative and artisanal ketchups and the ever-increasing popularity of my personal favorite condiment, Sriracha.

What is? Heat the olive oil in a large, heavy-bottomed pot over medium heat. Add the onion and cook until translucent, about 3 minutes. Add the garlic and cook for 1 minute, while stirring. Add the tomatoes, salt, paprika, cinnamon, cloves, celery salt, cumin, dry mustard, chili powder, and ground pepper and simmer, covered, stirring occasionally, for 20 minutes.

Blend until smooth with an immersion blender or transfer the mixture to an upright blender in two batches and puree until smooth. If transferred, return the mixture to the pot. Add vinegars, brown sugar, and honey. Cook over medium heat, uncovered, stirring often, until the ketchup thickens, about 30 minutes. Adjust salt, pepper, and chili powder to taste.

All rights reserved. It is a dynamic red concoction. At once savory and sweet, with just the right amount of puckering twang, it is slathered and squirted onto our favorite foods. Share Tweet Email. Why it's so hard to treat pain in infants. The sauce that served as a starting point for modern ketchup was effectively a fermented paste derived from fish entrails and soybeans lauded for particularly strong pungence, and ability to hold up over the course of a long journey at sea.

It was precisely that last quality, in addition to its satisfyingly salty taste, that made the condiment an appealing commodity for British sailors along trade routes in southeast Asia.

By the s, this fermented fish paste had won enough of them over that they endeavored to bring it back home to England. In a preview of what was to come, the recipe was quickly bastardized, which I guess will happen when you're taking a condiment halfway around the world in the early 18th century.

One contemporary recipe from called for reproducing the condiment by boiling "two quarts of strong, stale beer and half a pound of anchovies," which is then left to ferment. Thankfully, ketchup's recipe has evolved from "mix stale beer with anchovies," but not without a circuitous route to its present form. Ketchup had caught on in England and in the US by the 19th century, but there wasn't a whole lot of consensus about how it should be made.

As a result, cooks could and definitely did make their own take on ketchup derived from all sorts of ingredients that we would hardly associate with the fast food items and backyard cookout staples we douse with ketchup today. We're talking oyster ketchup. Walnut ketchup. Lemon ketchup. Heck, even peach and plum served as the base for a ketchup. Pride and Prejudice author Jane Austen was known to be particularly fond of a certain mushroom ketchup recipe. While these ketchups were either boiled into a sort of syrup or salted and left to ferment, they usually had something in common: an intensely salty and spicy flavor.

It may have been a bit intense on the palate, but its longevity before spoiling certainly helped drive its adoption. After reading that list of other forms of ketchup, you're probably wondering why tomato wasn't in the mix. As the Chinese version is more akin to a Worcestershire sauce , the British used ingredients such as anchovies or oysters, mushrooms, and walnuts to recreate those flavors.

In turn, ketchup came to mean a condiment consisting of mushrooms. The English settlers brought this mushroom ketchup to America, where it continued to gradually go through various changes. One significant alteration was the addition of tomatoes , which first appeared in a recipe by Sandy Addison in in The Sugar House Book.

The recipe called for squeezing the tomatoes dry and then salting and boiling them. After pressing through a sieve, the tomato is combined with mace, nutmeg, allspice, cloves, cinnamon, ginger, and pepper to taste. It is then boiled until thick, cooled, and bottled. The bottled ketchup will last for several years, due to the amount of salt, which also made the ketchup taste, you guessed it, very salty. Because tomatoes are part of the Solanaceae family, which consists of certain poisonous plants, many people steered clear of eating fresh tomatoes, but were willing to consume ketchup, since the red fruit was cooked and preserved with other ingredients.

Thus, the popularity of bottled ketchup begins. It may surprise you to know that Heinz was not the first bottle of ketchup sold; that credit goes to a farmer named Jonas Yerkes, who was selling bottles of ketchup nationally by It wasn't until roughly 40 years later that the F.

Heinz Company began selling tomato ketchup, and by the end of the nineteenth century, it was the primary type of ketchup in the United States. Gradually, the descriptor of tomato in "tomato ketchup" was dropped from its name. Originally, unripe tomatoes were used, which required the addition of a preservative called sodium benzoate to prevent spoilage and loss of flavor.

But in the early s, the Food and Drug Administration banned the use of this additive, and Heinz began making their ketchup with ripe tomatoes, which contain more of the natural preservative pectin, and adding sugar and vinegar.