I love all history of bread making, I find it super interesting i wasn general the discover of foods we take for granted.
Protip: make your own ketchup sometime..hot dang it's easily to see why it became ubiquitous..and then cry over how terrible the mass produced stuff is ;)
Weird that you said 'the EU' rather than 'Europe'. But since you did I'll point out that there are several EU territories in America that would have had ketchup to begin with.
It did, but ketchups before tomato weren't necessarily fruit based. The original British version (and thus, the first American version, from which the other pre-tomato version derived) was mushroom based. Fruit, nut, egg, and bivalve-based versions all existed. (And the historical origin is in Asian fermented fish and soy sauces.)
It's a weird quirk of history. Garum was forgotten for centuries, then the same basic concept reintroduced much later from Asia.
It still wasn't used quite the way garum was, but it did give rise to things like Worcestershire sauce, and various ketchups (fermented vegetable pastes). Tomato ketchup came much later, and it wasn't until Heinz perfected it that it reached the form that's ubiquitous now.
That's not true. Ketchup is believed to have come "ultimately from Chinese via Malay kicap, from Min Nan 膎汁 (kê-chiap, “fish broth”), though precise path is unclear – there are related words in various Chinese dialects, and it may have entered English directly from Chinese. Cognate to Indonesian kecap, ketjap (“soy sauce”). Various other theories exist – see Ketchup: Etymology for extended discussion." [1]
This etymology places the origin of ketchup closer to "fish sauce", pickled cabbage with meat, or conceptually even yogurt or bread!
> so it long preceded the arrival of the tomato.
Yes, but it has nothing to do with fruits, unless you are fermenting them to get rid of bad-bacteria and maybe increase shelf-life.
After reading the further Wikipedia entry on the etymology of the term, it feels like it should be stressed more strongly that the etymology you quoted is not necessarily the strongest contender, but just one of a few that may or may not be correct.
Would you be specific as to what etymology you mean? I linked the extended discussion above.
The Wiktionary page I linked to, as well as many other etymological pages on the web say what I did above. There are many things that could be true, but they do not all have the same likelihood.
Even NPR [1] and the history channel [2] have pages on the etymology of ketchup.
Yes. That wiktionary link and text was posted by me in my comment.
My question was to name specifically which etymology on a secondary page is more likely than the one listed at the main entry and on almost all etymology websites? The burden of proof is on the person who wrote, "it feels like it should be stressed more strongly that the etymology you quoted is not necessarily the strongest contender".
Ketchup was actually originally a fish sauce from Asia. Then it slowly became a mushroom based sauce in Europe.
Finally, tomato based ketchup became dominant, yes. But the lineage of ketchup in Europe (of course, it is even older in East and Southeastern Asia) goes way before the Columbian exchange,
Protip: make your own ketchup sometime..hot dang it's easily to see why it became ubiquitous..and then cry over how terrible the mass produced stuff is ;)