Ketchup Was a Fish Sauce Long Before It Met a Tomato

A plate of chips arrives, golden and too hot to touch, and a hand reaches for the red bottle without even looking. A shake, a thump on the bottom, and out it comes. Almost nobody at the table could say where the tomato comes into the word ketchup, and there is a good reason for that. It does not come into it anywhere.

The word is older than the red sauce. It started life on the far side of the world, as the name of something a chip would not recognise at all: a salty liquid made from fish.

Where the word was born

Merriam-Webster traces ketchup to Southern Min, the group of Chinese dialects spoken in the south-east of Fujian province. In the port city of Xiamen the word was kôe-chiap, and in nearby Zhangzhou it was kê-chiap. The first half meant salted or pickled fish or shellfish. The second half, chiap, meant juice or sap. Put the two together and you get the juice of pickled fish, which is a fair description of a fish sauce.

The road it took west

From there the dictionary offers two possible routes. English may have borrowed the word directly, or it may have picked it up by way of Malay, where kecap also meant fish sauce. Either way it arrived early. Merriam-Webster dates its first known use in English to around 1690.

Once in English, the word began to wander. It was spelled catchup and catsup as well as ketchup, and all three spellings are still in the dictionary. It also stopped meaning fish. Dictionary.com notes that ketchup originally came in different flavours, made from ingredients such as walnuts, oysters or mushrooms. Only later did the tomato kind become the standard one, and then the only one most of us have ever met.

From English the word set off again. Spanish has kétchup, and the dictionary of the Real Academia Española says plainly that it came from English, defining it as a tomato sauce seasoned with vinegar, sugar and spices. Russian has ketchup as well, written in its own alphabet, and Kuznetsov's explanatory dictionary likewise follows it through English back to Chinese words for fish and sauce. Three languages, one bottle, and one fish at the bottom of all of them.

What people often get wrong

The natural assumption is that ketchup simply means tomato sauce, so that the words tomato ketchup on a label say the same thing twice. They do not. The label is a leftover from the time when ketchup was a whole family of sauces and a shopper needed to know which one was in the bottle. The tomato was a late guest who stayed so long that everybody forgot it had not been invited at the start.

Where the dictionaries disagree

The trail is old, and the reference books do not match in every detail. On the date, Merriam-Webster says about 1690, while Dictionary.com places the first record between 1705 and 1715. On the meaning, Merriam-Webster and Kuznetsov read the first syllable as fish. The Spanish academy describes the original as a spicy sauce of fermented soy or fish and suggests, with a careful perhaps, that the syllable meant pulp or something squeezed. Dictionary.com is unsure of the Chinese source and links it to words for eggplant and juice. What none of them offers is a tomato. So the next time the bottle needs a thump, you can tell the table that the word inside it once smelled firmly of the sea.