Ketchup, an Asian sauce without tomato.

How can a sauce whose main ingredient is tomato come from China, whose traditional cuisine does not even use it? Here we have another instance of how a recipe can change dramatically at the same time its name does. The clue to this answer is placed, as I said before, in China, in the seventeenth century. Curiously, this Chinese sauce, called ketsiap, had seasoning of fish as one of its main ingredients whereas in the present ketchup we don’t have anything of this kind.

In the eighteenth century, the recipe came to Europe, most specifically to England and Germany. The change occurred when Henry J. Heinz, a name I bet you surely know because of his popular commercialized sauces, added tomato to the ketsiap and even made it be its main ingredient. He named it Ketchup and became a common sauce to accompany fish and meat.

The controversial thing of all this is that everybody in China and England believed both the ketsiap and the ketchup were exactly the same and the ketchup became very criticized by Chinese tourists and travelers who, when they came to Europe and demanded ketchup in a restaurant, got shocked due to the terrible taste and difference it had from their ketsiap. The answer would have been simply to read the label of a ketchup can and notice it contained tomato, but they preferred to argue about how horrible English cuisine was.