Not really I was reading this at Wikipedia and it says.........
By 1801 a recipe for tomato ketchup was printed in an American cookbook, the Sugar House Book.[1] In 1824 a ketchup recipe appeared in The Virginia Housewife, an influential 19th-century cookbook written by Mary Randolph, Thomas Jefferson's cousin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketchup
That is not an incorrect statement by any means, but allow me to rephrase myself...
Ketchup (
as we know it) was invented in the 1870's by Henry J. Heinz.
When he was 25 years old, he started his first company and sold his mothers recipe for a grated horseradish sauce. After that company lost all of it's money, he founded another company which marketed his recipe for ketchup. He took the format of a
chinese barbecue sauce which was composed of a tomato base, as well as improvisations of other tomato based sauces (or "ketchups") and made it into the condiment that we all know today. Ketchup was one of those culinary terms that had a generic meaning. Eons and eons ago, it was just a slang term for sauce, which was used in reference to pretty much anything that contained herbs and spices. But, ketchup, as we know it today, was invented in the 1870's.
In the culinary world, there are a lot of words that change their meaning throughout time which makes things a little confusing when looking at it's history. In fact, the word "restaurant" was originally in reference to a "restorative broth" (usually a consomme). It was the name of the
thing that was eaten,
not the place it was eaten at. Just some food for thought...pun 100% intended.
I wish someone could explain the "57" on the Heinz bottle though.
