What was the original ketchup?

Answer

The Hokkien word 'ke-tsiap' traveled via Southeast Asia and Britain. Tomatoes came much later.

Context

The word ketchup is generally traced to a Chinese-language term for a fermented fish sauce, often linked to the Hokkien-speaking region of Fujian and rendered as ke-tsiap or similar spellings. Smithsonian Magazine describes the early sauce as a fish-based seasoning that spread to Southeast Asia, where related names such as kecap survive. In Indonesian and Malay, kecap now refers to soy-based sauces, which shows how the word moved to other foods over time.

British traders and colonists met the sauce in the eighteenth century and found it exotic. Because the original ingredients and methods were hard to reproduce at home, English cooks made their own versions with anchovies, mushrooms or walnuts as the main flavoring. Mushroom ketchup was a staple in English cookbooks for a long time. Tomatoes entered the story later, and Smithsonian reports that the first published tomato ketchup recipe appeared in 1812 in an American publication by James Mease.

Early tomato ketchups were thin and were often preserved with large amounts of vinegar or other additives. Sweeter, thicker versions became common in the nineteenth century, and the large-scale commercial producer H. J. Heinz is often linked to the shift toward standardized bottled ketchup and food-safety practices, as National Geographic discusses. A common misconception is that ketchup has always been a tomato product. The evidence points instead to a long history as a salty, fermented sauce, with the tomato version being a relatively recent chapter. The exact path from the Chinese word to the English one is debated by linguists, so details of the etymology should be treated with some caution.