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Ketchup

Ketchup (or catsup) is a sauce or condiment, often made with fully ripened tomatoes.

Manufacturing

The basic recipe for modern ketchup is tomatoes, vinegar, sugar, salt, allspice, cloves and cinnamon. Onions, celery and other spices are frequent additions. Two major commercial distributors of ketchup in the U.S. are the H. J. Heinz Company and Hunt's.

In the past, ketchup was produced from fresh tomatoes during its harvest season. The invention of vacuum evaporation made it possible to turn tomatoes into a very thick tomato paste that is easy to store at room temperature. This enables a factory to produce ketchup throughout the year.

Since 2000, Heinz has been marketing colored ketchup products. These popular products are made from adding food coloring to the traditional ketchup.

Nutritional values

According to the United States Department of Agriculture Food Nutrient Database 17, the nutritional values of ketchup are:

Nutrient (per 100 g)	Catsup	Catsup, low sodium	Tomatoes, red, ripe, raw, year round average	USDA Commodity, salsa	La Victoria, Salsa Brava, Hot	Peanut butter, smooth style, with salt	Peanut butter, smooth style, without salt	Peanut butter, smooth style, fat reduced
Energy	100 kcal	104 kcal	18 kcal	36 kcal	40 kcal	588 kcal	588 kcal	520 kcal
Water	68.33 g	66.58 g	94.50 g	89.70 g	88.67 g	1.81 g	1.81 g	1.20 g
Protein	1.74 g	1.52 g	0.88 g	1.50 g	1.36 g	25.09 g	25.09 g	25.09 g
Fats	0.49 g	0.36 g	0.20 g	0.20 g	1.11 g	50.39 g	50.39 g	34 g
Carbohydrates	25.78 g	27.28g	3.92 g	7.00 g	6.16 g	19.56 g	19.56 g	35.65 g
Sodium	1110 mg	20 mg	5 mg	430 mg	648 mg	459 mg	17 mg	540 mg
Vitamin C (RDA: 60 mg/day)	15.1 mg	15.1 mg	12.7 mg	4 mg	7.2 mg	0 mg	0 mg	0 mg
Lycopene	17007 mcg	18968 mcg	2573 mcg	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a

In comparison with other junk food condiments, such as salsa, ketchup seems to be less healthy due to its sweetness and added salt. However, it is stll somewhat better than peanut butter which is still less fatty than butter or margarine. Nothing beats real tomatoes. For more details, please visit the USDA National Nutrient Database website. Ketchup packets provided in fast-food restaurants are usually weight from 6 g to 10 g.

Restaurant	Packet size	Energy	Sodium	Carbohydrates
Arby's	9 g	10 kcal	100 mg	2 g
Burger King	10 g	10 kcal	127 mg	3 g
Jack in the Box	9 g	10 kcal	105 mg	2 g

The sodium intake defined by the U.S. Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) for an adult is about 2,400 mg per day. And the National Research Council of the U.S. suggested an even lower 1,100 to 3,300 mg intake. Therefore, with just a few packets of ketchup a day, you will consume too much sodium. The average sodium intake in the U.S. is about 4,000 to 5,000 mg per day.

Containers

Traditionally, ketchup was stored in glass bottles and was difficult to pour. The glass container was to keep ketchup away from moisture and oxidization. However, the physical properties of ketchup make it difficult to pour smoothly from a glass bottle. Without shaking, ketchup tends to stick to the inner surface of the bottle.

To a physicist, ketchup is not just a condiment for french fries, it is also a thixotropical non-Newtonian fluid whose apparent viscosity decreases with duration of stress. This means that a physicist, like everyone else, sometimes has to shake fairly hard to force ketchup to flow out of its glass bottle.

With the advancement of plastics, the newly invented HDPE squeeze bottles made it much easier to apply ketchup without shaking the bottle for fluid mechanics's sake.

An early recipe of tomato ketchup

1. Get [the tomatoes] quite ripe on a dry day, squeeze them with your hands till reduced to a pulp, then put half a pound of fine salt to one hundred tomatoes, and boil them for two hours.
2. Stir them to prevent burning.
3. While hot press them through a fine sieve, with a silver spoon till nought but the skin remains, then add a little mace, 3 nutmegs, allspice, cloves, cinnamon, ginger and pepper to taste.
4. Boil over a slow fire till quite thick, stir all the time.
5. Bottle when cold.
6. One hundred tomatoes will make four or five bottles and keep good for two or three years."

Mrs. Samuel Whitehorne, Sugar House Book, 1801, Collection of the of Newport, Rhode Island.

Note: this ketchup is extremely salty. Therefore it can be "good for two or three years" without adding sugar and vinegar as preservatives. This is not the kind of mass-produced sweet-and-sour ketchup you buy in a supermarket today. Imported Caribbean cane sugar was an expensive item in the 19th century in New England. See: The History of Sugar in the West.

Etymology

Ketchup has not always been made out of tomatoes. It started out as a general term for sauce, typically made of mushrooms or fish brine, herbs and spices. Later it was reformulated to include anchovies, walnuts, mushrooms and kidney beans.

The earliest English usages

Around the late seventeenth century the name and samples arrived in England where it appeared in print as catchup and then finally as ketchup. For example, the New Dictionary of the Canting Crew (1690) defines it as 'a high East-India Sauce'. Here is a list of quotations collected by the Oxford English Dictionary.

• 1690, B. E., A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew
  • Catchup: a high East-India Sauce.
• 1711, Charles Lockyer, An Account of the Trade in India 128
  • Soy comes in Tubbs from Jappan, and the best Ketchup from Tonquin; yet good of both sorts are made and sold very cheap in China.
• 1730, Jonathan Swift, A Panegyrick on the Dean Wks. 1755 IV. I. 142
  • And, for our home-bred british cheer, Botargo, catsup, and caveer.
• 1748, Sarah Harrison, The Housekeeper's Pocket-Book and Compleat Family Cook. i. (ed. 4) 2,
  • I therefore advise you to lay in a Store of Spices, ... neither ought you to be without ... Kitchup, or Mushroom Juice.
• 1751, Mrs. Hannah Glasse, Cookery Bk. 309
  • It will taste like foreign Catchup.
• 1817, George Gordon Byron, Beppo viii,
  • Buy in gross ... Ketchup, Soy, Chili~vinegar, and Harvey.
• 1832, Vegetable Substances Used for the Food of Man 333
  • One ... application of mushrooms is ... converting them into the sauce called Catsup.
• 1840, Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge (1849) 91/1
  • Some lamb chops (breaded, with plenty of ketchup).
• 1845, Eliza Acton, Modern Cookery v. (1850) 136 (L.)
  • Walnut catsup.
• 1862, Macmillan's Magazine. Oct. 466
  • He found in mothery catsup a number of yellowish globular bodies.
• 1874, Mordecai C. Cooke, Fungi; Their Nature, Influence and Uses 89
  • One important use to which several ... fungi can be applied, is the manufacture of ketchup.

The spelling "catsup" seems to have appeared first from the pen of Jonathan Swift, in 1730.

A recipe for tomato ketchup found its way over the Atlantic and the rest is history. Ketchup in the 1800s referred to any sauce made with vinegar.

The China Connection

One popular theory is that the word ketchup is derived from kôechiap or kê-tsiap which is from the Amoy dialect of China by way of the Malay word, kchap. The word is pronounced "ke4 jap1" in Cantonese. However, the exact Chinese characters for kôechiap has been disputed.

Theory 1: "ketchup" means "茄汁"

"茄" is the Chinese charcter for "eggplant" or a shortened form of "tomato" (蕃茄). "Ketchup" means "茄汁" or "tomato juice (sauce)".

Pronounciations in modern Taiwanese dialect (very similar to Amoy's):

• 茄(kiô)
• 汁(chiap)

Pronunciations in modern Cantonese:

• 茄(ke4)
• 汁(jap1)

(Sounds like Kay-dzup)

Theory 2: "ketchup" means "鮭汁"

"鮭" is the Chinese charcter for "salmon" (鮭魚). However, in this case, a Japanese source believes it refers to "fish". Therefore, "ketchup" means "鮭汁" or "fish sauce".

Pronounciations in modern Taiwanese dialect:

• 鮭(kôe)
• 汁(chiap)

Pronunciations in modern Cantonese:

• 鮭(gwai1)
• 汁(jap1)

Ketchup and U.S. politics

In 1981, Ronald Reagan's budget director, David Stockman, proposed classifying ketchup as a vegetable as part of Reagan's budget cuts for federally financed school lunch programs (it would make it cheaper to satisfy the requirements on vegetable content of lunches). The suggestion was widely ridiculed and the proposal was killed.

In 2004, to provide an alternative to the John Kerry-linked dominant brand, some supporters of George W. Bush formed a limited liability partnership to manufacture a brand of ketchup called W Ketchup. According to them, W stands for George Washington, the founding father and the first president of the U.S. However, this letter is widely believed to stand for George W. Bush's middle name. The irony of this political move is that Teresa Heinz Kerry's late husband Henry John Heinz III (from whom she takes the Heinz name) was a Republican senator before his death in 1991.

See also

• Tomato sauce
• Las Ketchup (pop group)