A ketchup story

I will begin by ruining a perfectly good dinner-table staple.  Ketchup..was not born in America and it certainly wasn’t born red. It immigrated there much later (don't tell Trump), wearing a tomato-red passport someone forged in the 19th century.   If you want to find its cradle, you have to stand on a creaking wooden pier somewhere on the South China Sea (definitely don't tell this to  Trump) and breathe in the mingled perfume of tar, salt, and fermenting fish.

Ok plastic wasn't around yet but you get the idea.

Sailors from Fujian once traded a fermented brine called kê-tsiap.  Sharp, saline, humming with protein and time.  It wasn’t a sauce you’d drown potatoes in, a condensed taste of ocean not unlike Roman Garum or Vietnamese Nuoc Mam (fish sauce).  I picture one jar tucked between star anise and dried tangerine peel, carried across monsoon routes on a junk and poured sparingly into woks and broths to wake the dead.  There is nothing sweet about the original. It is stern, medicinal, umami to the bone.

Sail farther eastwards (always follow the merchants) and kê-tsiap lands in island markets.  In Java, it learns softness: ketjap. The local palate adds sweetness to the brine with palm sugar and spices until ketjap manis turns viscous and perfumed, like night air warmed by clove cigarettes.  I remember my first spoonful on grilled chicken: not a condiment but a conversion to soy and smoke. This is when you understand that food travels better than kings, adapting to survive the kitchen politics of empire.

Then, the British arrive and do what the British have always done (no not boil it to death and serve it with mint jelly).  For foreign delicacies, they take it home and improvise with what’s on hand ( unfortunately not much).  No fermented fish? Mushrooms will do, walnuts will do, anchovies will do.  Georgian kitchens suddenly produce a flurry of “ketchups,” most of them are dark and thin.  The colour of mahogany, bottled like medicine and dosed like sorcery.  If you think I’m being fanciful, taste a proper mushroom ketchup and tell me it doesn’t taste like the forest wrote you a divorce letter.  Deeply savoury, fleet-footed, more perfume than sauce this is the abusive cousin to gravy with none of the silkiness.

The British really try you know.

Across the Atlantic, the new United States of America fall hard for the tomato. Industrial bottlers and savvy American businessmen standardize acidity and sweetness until red ketchup becomes a citizens’ rite. Sugar gets cheap; shelf life gets long, diabetes appears. The label becomes the law. And so a once-fermented, brine-born traveller is reborn as a democratic sauce engineered to flatter everything from roadside fries to factory-formed burgers. I’m not judging; I, too, have drowned a hot dog in a pool of red. But, I can’t help hearing the distant clink of those original jars whenever I twist open a plastic cap.

Now for my favourite detour, the one that annoys all tidy narratives. Head to the Eastern Caribbean, to St Lucia, with its rainforest mountains where bananas are not just a fruit but fate. The Island depends almost entirely on banana export. There, ketchup finds a yellow mirror. When tomatoes behaved like absentee landlords—too scarce, too expensive, or simply not as abundant as the island’s main harvest—cooks answered with wit. Bananas offered body, gentle sweetness, and a way to bind spice and tang into the familiar cadence of “ketchup” while speaking in a St Lucian accent. Puréed fruit took the place of tomato pulp; vinegar provided lift; spices and Scotch bonnet gave the grin. The result is banana ketchup: bright, tropical, playful—but more than a novelty. It returns ketchup to its oldest habit: adaptation. Resourcefulness in a bottle. Sovereignty by way of condiment.

I like the justice of it. The sauce that once rode empire’s ships comes back island-made, gold instead of red, smiling at the orthodoxies of the supermarket aisle. If you taste it with attention, you’ll find all the old stations of the journey—salt, sweetness, umami, spice rearranged like a puzzle. A lick of allspice here, a citrusy lift there, the warmth of pepper rising like a curtain cue. It’s not “dessert ketchup.” It’s a clever cook’s answer to supply and terroir.

When I tell this story tableside, someone always asks which is “authentic,” as if authenticity were a crown to be bestowed rather than a history to be tasted. I shrug, just pass me the bottle (oh and the wine too). The truth is that ketchup is a migrant with a talent for visas. Kê-tsiap, ketjap, mushroom elixir, red Americana, island gold: each is faithful to its place and era. If you want a single essence, it is balance. The precise collusion of salt, acid, umami, sweetness, and spice that makes your jaw hinge, your eyes brighten, your hand reach unconsciously for another bite. Call that authenticity, if you must. I call it appetite, the most cosmopolitan instinct we have.

Enjoy 😋