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: An 1817 recipe incorporated both tomatoes and anchovies, an homage of sorts to ketchup's original roots as a fish sauce. However, as the Oxford Companion notes, the popularity of tomato ketchup would really take off after the Civil War. An 1891 issue of Merchant's Review boasted that ketchup was the "sauce of sauces" and five years later The New York Tribune declared that tomato ketchup was America's national condiment that was "on every table in the land." The most famous producer of tomato ketchup, of course, is the Pittsburgh-based H.J. Heinz Company. In 1882, company founder Henry J. Heinz began patenting what would become the company's famous ketchup bottles. By 1908, just over a quarter of a century later, sales of Heinz Ketchup reached $2.5 million, an unprecedented amount for that era. Additionally, according to a company statement given to China Daily earlier this year, Henry Heinz deliberately chose the spelling "ketchup" for his product as a way to stand out from most of his competitors, who preferred the word "catsup." Since ketchup's heydey, the sauce has been immortalized on film in movies like 1982's Diner and Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. Advice columnists Dear Abby and Ann Landers both had to counsel young wives and daughters about how to deal with their relatives who would slather ketchup all over their favorite foods. And President Richard Nixon made headlines in 1969 when it was revealed that his favorite breakfast was cottage cheese and ketchup.