Title: Ketchup: The All-American Condiment That Comes From Asia : Code Switch : NPR
Headings: Ketchup: The All-American Condiment That Comes From Asia
Ketchup: The All-American Condiment That Comes From Asia
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Content: Millions of Americans douse their french fries, hamburgers, hot dogs and other favorite foods with it every day. The ubiquitous tomato-based sauce has been a staple in American cuisine for over a century, with surveys finding that 97% of kitchens in the United States contain a bottle. Given those facts, many Americans may be surprised to learn that ketchup's origins aren't American at all and that tomatoes were introduced to the mix relatively late in the sauce's history. The story of ketchup is in many ways a story of globalization and international trade. On his blog The Language of Food, Stanford University professor Dan Jurafsky comprehensively traces the tangy condiment's long journey from Southeast Asia to China, then to Europe and, eventually, the United States. Depending on how it is translated, ketchup's predecessor was known as ke-tchup, kôechiap or kê-tsiap in Hokkien Chinese. It referred to a pickled fish brine or sauce from the Fujian province of China and Southeast Asia. As Jurafsky notes, "Fermented food products have a long tradition in Asia." Later, vegetables like beans would also be fermented and made into pastes, and Hokkien Chinese traders would bring these sauces to Malaysia and Indonesia, where they were known by the names kechap and ketjap respectively. Ke-tchup would make the journey westward when it was brought back to Europe by Dutch and English sailors in the 1600s.