Food For Thought	Fish Guts by Joe George

“Americans can eat garbage, provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup…”
—Henry Miller

So this is how it sometimes starts with me. There I was at my nephew’s birthday party eating a hotdog. I had it slathered with ketchup and the hotdog was just off the grill. It was still hot enough that when you bit into it the skin sort of “popped,” releasing salty goodness that only something stuffed into a synthetic casing can. It was my first backyard meal of the season and I was thoroughly enjoying it. And as I was eating I began to unconsciously analyze it; I can’t help myself.

What a combination, I thought: hotdogs and ketchup. There were other condiments, of course, but for some reason I chose only ketchup. It’s how I used to eat hotdogs as a child. It reminded me of those idyllic times.

Being interested in food origins, I began to wonder about ketchup. I already have my theories on the disputed history of the hotdog, but what about ketchup? It’s so ubiquitous, it’s probably in every refrigerator in America. It’s certainly a mainstay in fast food restaurants. Surely ketchup was not always as it is today, laden with super-sweet corn syrup. I did a little research, and it was easy to prove this true. I knew of one food historian, Andrew Smith, who went so far as to write an entire book on the subject: Pure Ketchup, A History of America’s National Condiment. I shan’t bore the reader with that much information.

An internet search for the phrase “ketchup recipe” yielded more than 11,000 hits. This doesn’t surprise me, but what does interest me is that after skimming through my cookbooks I learned that almost all of them penned before 1950 had at least one recipe for ketchup (or catsup), and many had nothing to do with tomatoes.

This included a thin hand-written volume I inherited from my late grandmother, who probably learned the recipes at the apron strings of her mother. My grandmother was born in 1906 (which she often referred to as “aught-six”) and I have no way of knowing when she actually wrote down the recipe. What intrigued me was that the recipe, which is simply titled “catsup,” contained no tomatoes. It’s mainly comprised of spiced sweet-and-sour onions and peppers—sort of a relish, really.

Scanning other cookbooks my initial thoughts were confirmed. As is the case of many condiments, ketchup is a form of preservation dating to times before modern refrigeration.

The Boston Cooking School Cookbook, originally published in 1918, lists four catsup recipes: apple, gooseberry, grape, and tomato. The classic 1859 British tome, Beeton’s Book of Household Management, lists three types of ketchup: mushroom, walnut, and oyster. Closer to home, a cookbook published in 1917 by the Women of the First Congregational Church in Malone, New York lists two: cucumber and tomato. And in the Buffalo Evening News Cooking School Cookbook, circa 1925, there are two recipes for ketchup, currant and tomato. What is really interesting is that while most are found in chapters for pickles or relishes, the Buffalo Evening News Cooking School Cookbook lists them in a chapter called “Preservation of Food.”

Our winters have always been frigid, summers humid, and growing seasons short, but I can only image what it was like to deal with food preservation then. Because of the laborious task of food preparation, and the basic chore of acquiring ingredients to do the job, the thought of food waste must have been unimaginable.

What is truly difficult to swallow (pun intended) is the unique origin of ketchup. English sailors are said to have came across Chinese cooks using a pungent sauce they referred to as ke-tsiap, the Chinese word for pickled fish sauce, and it was originally made from fermented fish entrails.

I can only surmise this was a more pungent version of the modern day fish sauces that are prevalent in Far East cuisines today. How it went from fermented fish guts to mushrooms, fruit, walnuts, and finally the glorious tomato one can only speculate. But one thing is for sure, I dasn’t (another of my grandmothers common words) take ketchup for granted again.