--- title: "Ketchup Was a Fermented Fish Sauce Invented in Asia. Heinz Turned It Into Something Entirely Different." id: "3444" type: "post" slug: "ketchup-fermented-fish-sauce-asia-heinz-different" published_at: "2026-10-07T11:20:00+00:00" modified_at: "2026-10-07T11:20:22+00:00" url: "https://beestrot.com/features/food-stories-by-jean-louis/ketchup-fermented-fish-sauce-asia-heinz-different/" markdown_url: "https://beestrot.com/features/food-stories-by-jean-louis/ketchup-fermented-fish-sauce-asia-heinz-different.md" excerpt: "The word ketchup comes from a fermented fish sauce called ke-tsiap made in Fujian, China, around 300 BCE. British sailors brought the name home and made it from mushrooms for 150 years. Tomatoes appeared in America in the 1800s. Henry..." taxonomy_category: - "Food Stories by Jean Louis" taxonomy_post_tag: - "foodhistory" - "foodmyths" - "FoodOrigins" - "FoodStories" - "KetchupHistory" --- # Ketchup Was a Fermented Fish Sauce Invented in Asia. Heinz Turned It Into Something Entirely Different. - October 7, 2026October 7, 2026 - by [Jean Louis](https://beestrot.com/author/jean-louis/) - [Food Stories by Jean Louis](https://beestrot.com/focus/features/food-stories-by-jean-louis/) ![Ketchup Was a Fermented Fish Sauce](https://beestrot.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Ketchup-Was-a-Fermented-Fish-Sauce.jpg "Ketchup Was a Fermented Fish Sauce Invented in Asia. Heinz Turned It Into Something Entirely Different. 1") Last Updated on October 7, 2026 by [Jean Louis](https://beestrot.com/author/bistroboss/) Pick up a bottle of Heinz ketchup. Look at the label. Tomatoes, vinegar, sugar, salt, spices. The colour is red. The texture is thick. The taste is sweet and sharp and unmistakably familiar to anyone who has ever been near a hamburger. Now consider that the word on the label, ketchup, is a linguistic fossil from a fermented fish sauce made in southeastern China around 300 BCE, and that the thing in the bottle has almost nothing in common with what the word originally described. The name survived. The contents were replaced entirely. What we call ketchup today is approximately as connected to the original ke-tsiap as a ship is connected to the word “navigation.” The story of how this happened is one of the more entertaining journeys in culinary history, and it involves fish entrails, British sailors, mushrooms, and a man in Pittsburgh who understood vinegar. > The original **ke-tsiap**, documented in the Hokkien-speaking coastal provinces of Fujian in southern China, was a sauce made from fermented fish paste. Fish entrails were rinsed, salted, packed into jars, sealed, and left outdoors to ferment in the sun for weeks. The resulting liquid was dark, thin, intensely savoury, and rich in umami. It was, in every meaningful sense, a close ancestor of the fish sauce you can buy in any Asian grocery today. When Fujianese traders spread it through maritime Southeast Asia, the Indonesians called it kecap. In modern Indonesian, kecap refers to any fermented sauce, including the sweet soy sauce kecap manis, which is as distant from the original fish brine as ketchup itself. **The word became a category. The category kept expanding until it contained almost anything.** British sailors encountered ke-tsiap in Indonesia and the Malay peninsula during the 17th century and did what the British have always done with food they enjoy: they tried to recreate it at home with whatever ingredients were available. The version that emerged in English kitchens bore little resemblance to the original. A London cookbook from 1742 contains a ketchup recipe calling for anchovies, mushrooms, shallots, beer and spices. The anchovies were a nod to the fish origins. The mushrooms were a practical substitution for ingredients that did not exist in England. And this mushroom-and-anchovy ketchup, dark and pungent and nothing like what sits on your table today, was the dominant form of ketchup in Britain for roughly 150 years. Tomatoes entered the story in America in the early 1800s, and their arrival was complicated by the [widespread belief that they were poisonous](https://beestrot.com/features/food-stories-by-jean-louis/tomato-poisonous-europe-history/) . They are in the nightshade family, and the leaves and stems are indeed toxic, which had given the fruit a bad reputation in Europe that it only slowly shook. By 1812, American cooks were experimenting with tomato-based ketchups, but the results were unreliable. Early tomato ketchups spoiled quickly, sometimes within days, because nobody had yet worked out how to preserve them at commercial scale without using additives that were themselves problematic. > Henry John Heinz solved this in 1876 with a combination of high-quality ripe tomatoes, a significantly increased proportion of vinegar, and enough sugar to balance the acidity. His formula was stable, consistent, and did not require the coal tar or sodium benzoate preservatives that his competitors were quietly using to disguise spoiling product. He put it in a glass bottle so customers could see what they were buying, a revolutionary act of transparency in an era when most condiments came in opaque containers and contained whatever the manufacturer decided to put in them. **The bottle was not just packaging. It was an argument.** You could see the product. You could hold it up to the light. Trust was built into the design. By 1888, Heinz had dropped the word “tomato” from the label entirely. It was just ketchup now. The implication was clear: tomato was the only variety that mattered, the version that had won, the ketchup against which all others would be measured. The mushroom ketchups and walnut ketchups and anchovy ketchups that had filled British pantries for a century and a half began their long retreat to footnotes in culinary history books. There is a version of this story that is entirely about American commercial success and European cultural displacement. There is another version that is about how food words travel further than food itself, picking up new meanings at each stop until the connection to the origin becomes purely etymological. I find the second version more interesting, because it applies to so much of what we eat. > In the Philippines, banana ketchup exists and is widely used, a product invented during the Second World War when tomatoes were scarce and the population needed a substitute. It is made from bananas, vinegar, sugar and spices, and it is coloured red to look like tomato ketchup, because by then the red colour had become inseparable from the concept. The banana ketchup is not pretending to be the fermented fish sauce. It is not even pretending to be the Heinz tomato formula. It is imitating the appearance of something that was already a radical reinvention of something else entirely. At some point in this chain, the word stopped describing an ingredient and started describing an idea. Next time you reach for the bottle, consider what you are holding. A name from a Chinese fish sauce. A colour from a 19th-century American marketing decision. A formula developed in Pittsburgh. A condiment so completely reinvented at every stage of its journey that nothing remains of the original except the sound of the word itself, echoing across two and a half millennia from the fishing villages of Fujian to the inside of your refrigerator door. The kitchen never lies. But sometimes it forgets where it came from. ***Jean Louis*** Every dish has a past. These books will take you further into it. [Pure KetchupAndrew F. SmithView on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1611170176?tag=econopass01-20&linkCode=ogi&th=1&psc=1) [The Condiment BibleView on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0028603605?tag=econopass01-20&linkCode=ogi&th=1&psc=1) [Much Depends on DinnerMargaret VisserView on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0802144934?tag=econopass01-20&linkCode=ogi&th=1&psc=1) ## Sources - [Food Republic. The Early History of Ketchup Has Nothing to Do With Tomato. Fujian fish sauce origins 300 BCE, British mushroom ketchup, Heinz 1876.](https://www.foodrepublic.com/1373807/the-early-history-of-ketchup-has-nothing-to-do-with-tomato/) - [Everything Everywhere. The History of Ketchup. British sailor adoption, 1742 London recipe, tomato ketchup timeline, banana ketchup Philippines.](https://everything-everywhere.com/the-history-of-ketchup/) - [Spice Alibaba. Tomato Ketchup History: From Fish Sauce to Global Condiment. Heinz vinegar formula, coal tar preservatives, glass bottle transparency.](https://spice.alibaba.com/spice-basics/tomato-ketchup-history) Share this article! [Set as Preferred Source](https://www.google.com/preferences/source?q=beestrot.com) Disclosure: This article may contain affiliate links. This means we may earn a commission if you click on a link and make a purchase at no extra cost to you. This applies to featured Amazon products or any other Beestrot's partners. Thank you for your support! Jean Louis. FediBack: Ketchup Was a Fermented Fish Sauce Invented in Asia. Heinz Turned It Into Something Entirely Different. Replies from the Open Social Web for [Ketchup Was a Fermented Fish Sauce Invented in Asia. Heinz Turned It Into Something Entirely Different.](https://beestrot.com/features/food-stories-by-jean-louis/ketchup-fermented-fish-sauce-asia-heinz-different/) Bluesky **@beestrot.com** 🟢 For 150 years, ketchup in Britain was made from mushrooms and anchovies. No tomatoes. After reading this, does the bottle on your table look different? Tell me below. **@bbbearscare.bsky.social** Would actually like to try the original version, very rare I use anchovies - I'll probably have to try an make it myself. **@beestrot.com** If you ever do, will you be kind to report here? 😊🙏 **@bbbearscare.bsky.social** Yes of course 😁 it be an interesting experiment hopefully better than me making my own lemon pepper seasoning as couldn't find it in stores. [View thread on Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/beestrot.com/post/3mxbtw7wxww24) Mastodon **@beestrot** 🟢 For 150 years, ketchup in Britain was made from mushrooms and anchovies. No tomatoes. After reading this, does the bottle on your table look different? Tell me below. [View thread on Mastodon](https://mastodon.social/web/statuses/117399404537131297) Tags:[foodhistory](https://beestrot.com/tags/foodhistory/) [foodmyths](https://beestrot.com/tags/foodmyths/) [FoodOrigins](https://beestrot.com/tags/foodorigins/) [FoodStories](https://beestrot.com/tags/foodstories/) [KetchupHistory](https://beestrot.com/tags/ketchuphistory/) ### More Delicious Reads - [Honey Found in Egyptian Tombs Is Still Edible. 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