Catchup on Ketchup

On April 28 I entitled the blog Catchup (or is it Ketchup?) but didn’t address the word on which the title was drawn. One June 2 I mentioned BOTUI, and it is the source of information that spurred today’s blog. Here’s what it says:

Ketchup has its roots in seventeenth century China. In 1690, Chinese cooks developed a brine sauce of pickled fish, shellfish, and spices that they used on fish and fowl. They called the tangy sauce “ke-tsiap.” This new sauce became popular and its use spread to Malaya, where it was called “ketchop.” In the early eighteenth century, English sailors traveling to Malaysia and Singapore bought the ketchop and brought it home to England. English cooks tried to imitate the Chinese recipe, but lacking many of the Eastern ingredients, substituted mushrooms, walnuts, and cucumbers. The English called this concoction “ketchup.”

…Its introduction to the United States came in 1792 when a recipe for tomato “catsup” was published in a cookbook. It didn’t become widely popular in the United States until H. J. Heinz began mass producing it in 1876.

Some further elucidations from etymonline.com: It gives the very specific date of its first use as 1711, and says it is from the Malay word spelled kichap, (my dictionary spells it kechap) and from the Chinese word (specifying the Amoy dialect) spelled koechiap. (My dictionary agrees with the BOTUI spelling.)

Etymonline also adds that “catsup (earlier catchup) is a failed attempt at Anglicization, still in use in U.S.” (Catchup is another accepted alternate spelling.) And one added note from etymonline.com: the modern form of the sauce began to emerge when U.S. seamen added tomatoes.

According to Answers.com, it was in 1940 that “the U.S. government established a "Standard of Identity" for ketchup as tomato-based.” Prior to that time, it was common for ketchup to be made from things other than tomatoes, since "including bananas, beets, or mangoes.”

Just in time for summer cookouts, you now have freedom to add bananas or beets or mangoes to your ketchup. (Or for Independence day add blueberries and chunks of bananas for a “red, white and blue” ketchup. It’d make a great sauce for barbecued pork chops.)

What’s the difference between a sauce and a condiment? A condiment is “any seasoning or relish for food” (my dictionary says) and either spices, flavorings, or a sauce can be a condiment. A sauce is a liquid or soft dressing served with food. So a sauce can be a condiment, but condiments aren't necessarily sauces.

Condiment came into Middle English through the Old French which came from the Latin word condimentum, from the word for pickling, condire. It appeared in English in the early 15th century.

The word sauce took the same path to mid-14th century English, through Middle English and Old French (sause, sausse, or sauce), and the Latin word from which it came is the word for salted food: salsa, the plural form of the word salsus.

Let's follow salsus another direction: into Vulgar Latin as salsicia, then from there to Old French (saulcisse) then into Old Norman French (saussiche) then into the Middle English word sausige and you have something to put the ketchup onto…chopped meat with plenty of condiments mixed in: sausage, or sawsyge as it was spelled in about 1450.