History of Ketchup • Magical Sauce from South China • Long Lost Cousin of Fish Sauce

Ketchup is a magical sauce though we tend to take it for granted in Singapore cuisine. It's often in our bak chor mee, wanton mee, chili crab, ku lou yuk, many sweet and sour dishes, etc. Its presence in Singapore cuisine is not often highlighted, sometimes unnoticed 😬 🤔

I'll admit that I fell in love with ketchup the very first time I tried it way back in the 1967. It was in ku lou yuk (Cantonese sweet and sour pork). I even remember the exact place - it was a Cantonese restaurant at Blk 94 in Toa Payoh, Singapore. The block of flats is still there, though the restaurant (I don't remember the name) had long gone.

We may think that ketchup is a quintessentially American thing that got entrenched in our daily meals be it bak chor mee, wanton mee, ku lou yuk, burger, pasta or chicken chop. So, it might surprise some of us that it has its roots in something else which we often find in Teochew and Hokkien dishes like in bak chor mee (minced pork noodle), orh chien (oyster omelette), etc - fish sauce. 

So yeah, fish sauce travelled one full circle around the world and returned to the bak chor mee (minced pork noodle) bowl as ketchup. The long lost cousin returned, beyond recognition but still sit comfortably with their old family (fish sauce) in the same bowl.

The great grandmother of ketchup was fish sauce 鲑汁 or kôe-chiap in Min language (Hokkien). kôe-chiap was mentioned in texts going back to 300 BC.

Fish sauce is the briny umami liquid made by salting and allowing fish to ferment in the sun for months, up to a year.

This technique of producing umami flavoured sauce spread to Indochina and later to the Malay archipelago (today's Indonesia) where it is known as kecap.

From the Malay archipelago, the British brought kecap back to England.  Kecap became "catchup" which first appeared in 1699 and later as ketchup in 1711.

Richard Bradley published a “Ketchup in Paste” recipe in 1732 from "Bencoulin in the East-Indies”. The fish sauce was replicated with herring and anchovies. 

Worcestershire sauce is one of the well known British fish sauces made with anchovies and spices.

The British controlled Bencoulin or Bencoolen (today's Bengkulu) in Sumatra from 1685 to 1824. Under the Anglo - Dutch Treaty of 1824, the British relinquished control of Bencoolen to the Dutch in exchange for Malacca. Stamford Raffles was Lieutenant Governor of Bencoolen from 1817 to 1824, and controlled Singapore from there. 

The British started to look for cheaper alternatives to fish, turning to mussel, mushroom and walnut. (Over in China, soy beans replaced fish in many breweries since 100 BC leaving only Chaoshan and Fujian as the last fish sauce holdouts in a culture dominated by soy sauce.)

The British brought ketchup to North America, then a British colony. It was here that they started to make ketchup with tomatoes. James Mease of Philadelphia was credited with the first recipe for tomato based ketchup in 1812 which contained tomato pulp, spices, and brandy.

Different regions of America have their own versions of tomato ketchup. In southern United States it is still sometimes called catsup.

One of the earliest recipes for tomato ketchup was published in 1827 in Eliza Smith’s The Compleat Housewife, or Accomplish’d Gentlewoman’s Companion. The free of charge PDF version is downloadable here 👈 click  Oh... the marvel and blessing of the world wide web.

In the 1870s, there was a tomato glut and Heinz pioneered glass bottled ketchup, hence the familiar bottles of tomato ketchup of today. Heinz also added sugar and vinegar to tomato ketchup to sweeten the sauce and prolong its shelf life. The concoction has the familiar savoury, sweet, tangy flavour of today's tomato ketchup which is synonymous with the Heinz brand.

In 1881, the British set up a ketchup plant in Yau Ma Tei 油蔴地 in Hong Kong. The ketchup was loaded into barrels which were shipped to England to be bottled. Some of these bottles were exported back to Hong Kong for retail. In Hong Kong, it became the magic sauce behind the familiar Cantonese sweet and sour dishes like ku lou yok, etc.

And, thus fish sauce went around the world, came back as ketchup, and found itself welcome back into Chinese cuisine as sweet sour dishes, Singapore style wanton noodle, bak chor mee, chili crab, etc.

Written by Tony Boey on 24 Nov 2022

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References:

Image of ku lou yuk courtesy of Flickr, image of fish sauce courtesy of Flickr, image of tomato ketchup courtesy of Wikipedia, image of kecap courtesy of Wikipedia, image of ketchup courtesy of Flickr.

The best article there is on the origin of ketchup