Hannah Glasse’s wildly popular The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy, first published in 1774, included two recipes for ketchup, notably without any fish. The first is simply the strained juice of boiled mushrooms, flavored with ginger, pepper, mace, and cloves. She notes, “If you put to a pint of this catchup a pint of mum”—a type of dark beer—”it will taste like foreign catchup.” Glasse’s other version is slightly more complicated, combining the boiled mushrooms with “stale beer,” horseradish, an onion stuck with cloves, allspice, and nutmeg, among other spices. She acknowledges that some cooks add a head of garlic, “but I think that spoils it.”
The lack of consensus on the proper way to spell “ketchup” eventually became something of a joke. The Domestic Chemist from 1831 counted three popular spellings: ketchup, catsup, and catchup. “These three words indicate a sauce,” the author writes, “of which the name can be pronounced by every body, but spelled by nobody.” In line with the times, the book notes that ketchup is the product of “the liquefaction of salted mushrooms.” It makes no mention of tomatoes.
The tomato arrives on the scene
There are at least a couple examples of post-independence American ketchup recipes, prior to The Domestic Chemist, that did include tomatoes as an ingredient. The “love apples,” as they were often referred to at the time, were salted, strained, and seasoned with spices—closer to what we call ketchup today. The first published recipe for a tomato-based ketchup, however, appeared in 1812. Its author was James Mease, a Philadelphia horticulturist whose ketchup was unstrained and lightly spiced, more in line with a tomato sauce. Mease’s version included brandy but no vinegar, which gave it a short shelf life—but later versions almost always included vinegar and sometimes partially fermented tomatoes.
In any event, it was a near-instant hit. As Smith writes, “Whatever reason for the initial application of the term tomato ketchup, it was widely and swiftly adopted throughout America early in the nineteenth century.” Tomatoes didn’t displace similarly umami-packed mushrooms, oysters, and other versions of ketchup, however. Cookbooks throughout the 1800s included dozens of recipes for different ketchups—and all the while, modern ketchup began taking form. To control spoilage, some recipes called for boiling and reducing the tomatoes, increasing their acidity and thereby their resistance to unwanted microbes. Salt, vinegar, and wine also contributed flavor and promoted fermentation prior to this stage.
But sugar was a later addition—Smith notes that it was not a common tomato ketchup ingredient until after the Civil War. Cooks began adding more and more vinegar and sugar, each to balance out the other, until ketchup arrived at the sweet-and-sour flavor profile to which we’re accustomed today. “The addition of sugar into tomato ketchup was a reflection of a trend favoring sweetness in American cookery,” Smith writes. “As sugar prices rapidly decreased due to the manifold increase in importation from the Caribbean, its use expanded in many dishes.”
Along came Heinz
In 1876, the world of ketchup changed forever. A first-generation German American named Henry J. Heinz launched his bottled version of ketchup—spelled “catsup”—following his success with bottled grated horseradish, which the company advertised alongside dozens of other products. (The “57 varieties” touted on its ketchup label was allegedly just a number that Henry Heinz picked because he thought it sounded good—by 1900, the company was selling more than 60 products.)
