Title: Where Did Ketchup Come From? | culinarylore.com
Headings: Where Did Ketchup Come From?
Where Did Ketchup Come From?
Who Invented Ketchup?
Where Did Ketchup Originate?
Etymology of the Word Ketchup
Ketchup versus Catsup
1895 Heinz Keystone Ketchup Recipe
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Content: In fact, tomato juice, as opposed to purees of tomato, didn’t even come about until around 1917, and it took until at least 1924 for tomato juice to be successfully canned. The idea that our word for ketchup could have come from a Chinese word for tomato juice is fishy. It is often a fallacy to assume that the modern meaning of a word has anything much to do with its etymon. That is, it is tempting to think that a theory tracing our modern word ketchup back to a word for “tomato sauce” should automatically hold more credence than one that traces it to a generic sauce. Columbia Catsup ad from 1899
Also, we have to realize that the attempt to phonetically render Chinese words into English produces many spellings that appear to be different words. There are a wide range of Romanization forms in use, and there is no standard to call on. Therefore, trying to research Cantonese words via Romanized spellings is an exercise in SNAFU. The word in question here is really the word that could be spelled as keh-tsap. It just so happens that this is the Cantonese word for tomato sauce. The word for tomato sauce in Mandarin is faan-tsie-je (fan ch’ieh), which loosely translates into “foreign eggplant.”