Non-tomato Ketchup?

Factual Questions
1

I was sitting in Fran’s restaurant on College Street in Toronto last week enjoying some shepherds pie, and the server brought over some ketchup.

The label had the word Tomato in small print, then KETCHUP in large fancy print.

I know (probably from reading it here) that the word ‘ketchup’ came from an east Asian word meaning ‘fish sauce’, though I’m not sure whether tht’s ‘sauce to cover fish with’ or ‘sauce made of fish’. But…

Is there such a thing as non-tomato ketchup, so that they had to specify that this particular ketchup contained tomatoes?

2

You got the right idea. The original ke-tsiap in South China was a fermented fish sauce, like Thai nam pla or Vietnamese nuoc nâm.

In Malaysia, kicap (same word) is what they call soy sauce.

So in a multicultural world, it makes sense to specify when your ketchup is made from tomatoes rather than fish or soy!

3

In Malay, kecap (pronounced ketchap) is soy sauce and kecap manis is sweet soy sauce. I don’t think that either one has tomatoes in it.

4

Great question!!!

When I lived in England,and asked for “Ketchup”, the response was always “Tomato Ketchup?”… and my response was always…
“Yes, please!”.

I seem to remember something about “Mushroom Ketchup”…

I’ll be back in a bit!

5

Hmmm. The idea of a mushroom ketchup sounds interesting!

“…it is important to realize that in the 18th and 19th
centuries ketchup was a generic term for sauces whose only common ingredient was vinegar. The word is first recorded in English in 1690 in the form catchup, in 1711 in the form ketchup, and in 1730 in the form catsup. These three spelling variants of a foreign borrowing remain current.”

Source: American Heritage Dictionary, Third Edition 1992

6

Check this out:

http://www.epinions.com/content_1874567300
A bit down the page it discusses the different kinds of ketchup:
Quote:
There were several different kinds of ketchup- from oyster, walnut, lemon, anchovy (barf), and (you guessed it) tomato. It made it into the United Sates in 1792 when a recipe for ketchup was published in a cookbook, and it took off from there. Ketchup was not popular in the states untill Henry John Heinz began mass production in 1876. Today’s Ketchup is nothing like it’s old Chineese counterpart, being made from tomatoes , vinegar, corn syrup, salt, and yadda yadda. It isn’t the fish brine sauce it used to be. Thank the Lord.
…

O6

7

There is also a “kecap ikan” which is fish ketchup, more or less the same as Nam pla (Thailand), Nuoc nam (Vietnam) and Patis (Philippines).

8

Ketchupworld lists a whole lot of non tomato ketchups. I have had a banana ketchup that my kids prefered to the tomato variety for a time.

9

I often get Filipino banana ketchup at a couple of food-fair places here in Vancouver. It’s as red as the tomato version, but tastes different enough to notice. (Not like bananas! Maybe that’s partly because it’s the hot version…)

10

In his recipe book " The Complete Book of Pickles & Relishes" Garden Way Publishing, Leonard Louis Levinson devotes a chapter to catsup.

Although tomato catsups dominate the chapter with 7 recipes,including one commercial recipe calling for 600 gallons of tomatos, Levinson shares 22 catsup recipes.
Mostly fruit catsups they include
[list=14]Garden Catsup
apple catsup
Hi Opal
Grape-Apple Catsup
Blackberry Catsup
Cranberry Catsup(2)
Cucumber Catsup
Gooseberry Catsup(2)
Guava Catsup
Lemon Catsup
Mushroom Catsup
Green Tomato Catsup
Peach Catsup
Walnut Catsup [/list]

Ohhhhh Walnut Catsup Yummmmm
:eek:

11

I’m amazed! So many kinds! SDMB comes through again!

I’m gonna hafta sample some of that banana ketchup…

12

You may be thinking of Geo. Watkins Mushroom Ketchup - I have a bottle of this in the cupboard; it’s not a thick ketchup like tomato sauce, more of a condiment in the nature of Worcester(shire) sauce and is primarily used to flavour meat pies, stews and stocks.

There is, of course, Brown Sauce (hover your cursor over the names), but I’ve never heard it called ketchup.