The Surprising Origins and Alternatives to Tomato Ketchup

Cookbooks published before the 20th century are delightful tomes of mystery. Sometimes there are recipes for cakes that call for dozens of eggs, making you wonder if the resulting cakes were enormous or if the eggs were just smaller. (Probably both.) Then there are the quirky ingredient lists, calling for amounts of butter “the size of a hen’s egg.” That has made me wonder if eggs were just really consistent in size back then. (Probably not.)

I usually recognize some of the food from old British and American cookbooks, but there’s always something that makes me scratch my head. For example, walnut ketchup.

Take half a bushel of green walnuts, before the shell is formed, and grind them in a crab-mill, or beat them in a marble mortar. Squeeze out the juice, through a coarse cloth, wringing the cloth well to get out all the juice, and to every gallon put a quart of wine, a quarter of a pound of anchovies, the same quantity of bay salt, one ounce of allspice, half an ounce of cloves, two ounces of long pepper, half an ounce of mace, a little ginger, and horseradish, cut in slices.

So reads a recipe from an English cookbook published in 1884. The recipe then goes on to tell the reader to boil the mixture down and bottle it for at least three months. If this doesn’t sound like your bright-red tomato ketchup, you’re not wrong.

Here’s the thing: Ketchup is a category, not a singular type of sauce. This thought came to me a few months ago, when I was dipping fries into a restaurant’s homemade pineapple ketchup. For centuries, people have been making ketchup out of all kinds of fruits, vegetables, and fungi. But what many people don’t know is that all this creativity stemmed from people trying to recreate a fish sauce from Asia.

Kê-chiap (膎汁) means, basically, “seafood pickle juice” in the Hokkien dialect of Southern China. It’s a likely origin for the word ketchup, although the Oxford English Dictionary also notes that ketchup may have come from the Malay word kecap. In any case, historians believe that some local briny liquid had a hold on foreign sailors, to the point that they tried to recreate something similar when they got home.

The first English recipe for “katchup” appears in a 1727 cookbook—as a fish sauce. Author Eliza Smith instructs the reader to put wine, shallots, anchovies, spices, and seasonings into bottles. After a week, she writes, the mixture can be added to sauces for fish and savory meat dishes.

Fish didn’t stay the primary ketchup flavoring forever, though. Eventually, cooks started to make ketchup with other ingredients that could impart a savory flavor. So, last week, I poked around online and drove around my city, and ended up with three bottles of fascinating ketchups from three different countries. Then, with a pile of French fries and mini corn dogs, I tried them all.

Mushroom Ketchup
England

Since it sounded so intriguing, I did want to try some walnut ketchup. It’s not sold in stores, though, and it’s not the season for green walnuts, either. So, instead, I ordered a different classic English ketchup: one made out of mushrooms.

Made by the company Geo Watkins, mushroom ketchup is strongly savory and spiced. “There’s a lot of cloves,” remarked a friend of mine who tried it. Mushroom ketchup, which originated around the 1720s, is delicious, but this version was not, in my opinion, good for dipping fries. For one thing, it’s very thin and watery. In the case of the mini corn dogs, it soaked the breading, making it fall off.

But mushroom ketchup was typically used as a seasoning, not a condiment. Even the back of the bottle, which calls the ketchup “the secret of success for many Victorian Cooks,” suggests adding it as a flavoring to steak and kidney pies or sauces, instead of eating it on its own.

A few years back, one of my Atlas Obscura colleagues, Sarah Laskow, even made her own mushroom ketchup. Like my commercial version, her end result didn’t taste very much like mushrooms. But it did have “a meaty, umami essence,” she wrote. The quest for that umami flavor is what made tomatoes, which are packed with rich glutamates, such a star in the ketchup world later on.

Banana Ketchup
Philippines

By the 20th century, tomato ketchup was king. But when tomatoes were too expensive or hard to get, people still turned to other ways to get their ketchup fix. In the Philippines, the invention of banana ketchup is often attributed to María Y. Orosa, a trailblazing food scientist and chemist who spent decades studying and teaching food preservation.

Banana ketchup is still popular today. When I went to pick up a bottle at my local Filipino grocery store, a sign above a nearly empty shelf declared that only one banana ketchup would be sold per person. Curious, I googled if there was a shortage. Instead, I found numerous articles from November 2024 explaining that many popular banana ketchup brands had been hit by an import ban from the American FDA, for containing additives such as potassium iodate above permissible levels.

NutriAsia, a major manufacturer of banana ketchup, released a statement that their sauces have been reformulated, and import has resumed. The banana ketchup I bought had an almost jelly-like texture, a bright-red color, and a bold banana flavor. Both the color and the banana flavor are artificial, according to the ingredient list, neither of which stops it from being a fun condiment for fries (and, famously, spaghetti).

Curry Ketchup
Germany

Unlike the two ketchups above, Germany’s curry ketchup is mostly tomato-based. It’s glammed up, though, with the addition of curry powder.

The story goes that, in 1949, a snack-bar owner in Berlin named Herta Heuwer mixed up a tomato sauce, laced it with curry powder and Worcestershire sauce, and served it with sausages. Some versions of the story also hold that she received those ingredients as food rations, or traded for them with a British soldier in return for some booze.

The sauce became so popular that Heuwer was able to patent it, and today, sausages with curry ketchup are an iconic street food in Germany. I’ve mixed curry powder with ketchup in the past, but for the first time, I went out and bought a bottle of premixed curry ketchup.

Without any artificial color, the sauce was a deep red-brown instead of the usual bright scarlet. The curry flavor was prominent without being spicy, and, as I scooped it up with fries, it reminded me that even regular ketchup has spices in it. Though Heinz’s formula is a closely-guarded secret, “copycat” ketchup recipes often include cloves, cayenne pepper, and even cinnamon.

Even though all the ketchups I tried were from different countries with very different cuisines, it’s fascinating how all three sprang from the same culinary root. While our ketchups of today don’t include fish, we’ve all been craving some kind of spiced, savory sauce for generations.