by Dan Jurafsky
One of the most prized modern fish sauces comes from Phu Quoc, a Vietnamese island off the coast of Cambodia in the Gulf of Thailand. Janet and I visited fish sauce factories there on our honeymoon, driving our motor scooter across the island in the rain to the old corrugated steel sheds along the river, the moist warm air pungent with the stench of fermenting fish. It’s all very romantic. Anchovies from the gulf were mixed with salt in huge ancient wooden tanks 10 feet high, painted bright Asian red but otherwise looking (at least to a couple of San Franciscans) like wine tanks in a Napa winery, with thoroughly modern stopcocks bored in and hoses snaking everywhere for mixing the sauce as it ferments.
Maybe these sixteenth-century Fujianese traders and seamen saw some of the same factories, and in any case they loved the fish sauce too, naming it ke-tchup, “preserved-fish sauce” in Hokkien—the language of southern Fujian and Taiwan. (Hokkien, Cantonese, and Mandarin are as linguistically different from each other as, say, Italian and French. I once took cooking classes in Taiwan, where Mandarin is the official language but Hokkien is very widely spoken; the other students had to translate into Mandarin for me when the chefs drifted into Hokkien. I did manage to learn how to make Hakka braised pork belly and keep my wok clean.)
A Chinese oceangoing junk running before the wind
From Zhou Huang’s Liuqiu Guo Zhi Lue (Account of the Ryukyu Islands), written in 1757
Of course, Hokkien isn’t written with the Roman alphabet, which explains why there are so many different spellings: ke-tchup, catsup, catchup, and katchup are all attempts by English, Dutch, or Portuguese speakers of the time to capture the sounds of the Chinese word. The word ke-tchup has died out of modern Hokkien, although I was still able to find it in old missionary dictionaries from the nineteenth century. The syllable tchup—pronounced zhi in Mandarin—still means “sauce” in Hokkien and in Cantonese. The syllable ke means “preserved fish” in Hokkien. Ke also looks like part of the Cantonese word for tomato, faan-ke, but that’s a coincidence, since Chinese dialects have lots of words that sound like ke and tomatoes weren’t added to the sauce until more than a century later.
Fujianese settlers took ke-tchup, soy, and their fermented red rice with them to Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. In Indonesia, they established Chinese sauce-making factories, small family businesses that fermented soy sauce and fish sauce. Soon the word kecap was adopted by Indonesians. It must have originally been borrowed from Hokkien in its original meaning of “fish sauce,” but as other sauces became more prominent over the intervening 400 years, kecap has generalized its meaning and now in Bahasa Indonesia, the language of Indonesia, kecap just means “sauce” (sweet soy sauce is kecap manis, fish sauce is kecap ikan, and so on). Linguists call this kind of generalization “semantic bleaching,” because part of the meaning (the salty fish part) got bleached out. (Almost the exact same kind of bleaching happened in the history of the English word sauce, which comes from the Latin word salsus originally meaning “salted”; just as in the Indonesian case, generalizing from meaning a briny sauce to meaning just any sauce at all.)
The red rice mash changed as well, turning out to be useful for more than just a flavoring for clay pot dishes. The immigrants began to turn red rice wine into arrack, an early ancestor of rum, distilling the fermented rice together with molasses and palm wine. The word arrack comes from the Arabic ‘araq (sweat), and is related to words for other distilled spirits like anise-flavored Levantine arak and the Croatian plum brandy rakia, as we’ll see. Arrack is a bit fiery and rough, as befits its archaic nature; you can taste it for yourself, since Batavia arrack (van Oosten brand) is still imported.
Chinese factories were established to make arrack on Java and Sumatra, using the Chinese pot still, a traditional Chinese method that boils the wort and drips the resulting arrack as condensing steam through tubes. The customers were presumably local, other Chinese and native Javans, or at least they were until two more groups of people wandered into Batavia and Bantam: British and Dutch merchants who had come to Southeast Asia looking for spices, textiles, and porcelain. Liquor was not yet well known at this time in England; this was before the invention of gin, and although Ireland and Scotland had already been drinking usquebagh, spirits in England were still purely medicinal. Edmund Scott, an English trader on Java, thus described arrack as “a kind of hot drink that is used in most of those parts of the world instead of wine.” British sailors in the tropics mostly drank sour wine and even sourer beer due to the fact that neither stood up well to tropical heat (even with the extra hops of India Pale Ale, a type of beer that in any case wasn’t developed until a few hundred years later).
Thus when Scott learned of arrack in 1604 from the Chinese tavern-keeper next door who distilled it in a backyard shed for his customers it was a revelation. Distilled spirits don’t go bad in the tropical heat, and they don’t oxidize. While this made arrack an exciting discovery for the British in general, this revelation wasn’t such a happy one to Scott himself. Under the cover of the noise of boiling water and clamor of tubs full of mash in the distilling shed, the Chinese tavern-keeper next door tunneled under Scott’s warehouse to steal the treasure Scott had buried in jars: 3000 silver Spanish pieces of eight from the mines in Bolivia, the same silver mines from which, 250 years later, Chilean and Peruvian miners brought mining techniques to the California gold fields of 1849. But I digress.
Before long the British were buying immense quantities of arrack, despite its expense; after all, navies full of British sailors needed something to drink, and rum hadn’t yet been invented. The Chinese settlements in Java were concentrated in Batavia (modern-day Jakarta), and it was here that the main industrial production occurred. Almost immediately, around 1610, arrack became the main ingredient in what cocktail historian David Wondrich calls “the original monarch of mixed drinks”: punch—a combination of arrack, citrus, sugar, water, and spice. Wondrich thinks this first cocktail was likely invented by British sailors, making good use of the lemons they were supplied with as the recently discovered cure for scurvy, and punch quickly became the “common drink” of all Europeans in Asia.
While acquiring a taste for arrack and punch, British sailors acquired a taste for something else they bought from Chinese merchants in Indonesia: ke-tchup. Shipboard fare—salt pork and the dry crackers called hardtack—was pretty bland, so ke-tchup may have helped enliven their diet, but it’s also possible traders just figured they could market it back home as an exotic Asian sauce. The British had a trading post in Bengkulu on Sumatra in the 1690s and one of the earliest recipes for ketchup in 1732 is for “Ketchup, in Paste. From Bencoulin in the East Indies.” It’s therefore likely that it is at one of such posts on either Java or Sumatra that the word ketchup first came into English.
By the turn of the eighteenth century, fish sauce and arrack had become as profitable for British merchants as they were for Chinese traders, as we see from the reports of a trader for the East India Company, Charles Lockyer, who traveled to Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, China, and India in 1703. His An Account of the Trade in India, a kind of vade mecum for would-be global capitalists, explains the vast sums of money to be made in Asia, and how to get rich by bargaining with the Chinese and other foreigners:
The cover of Charles Lockyer’s 1711 memoir of his travels in Asia
Soy comes in tubs from Jappan, and the best Ketchup from Tonqueen [northern Vietnam]; yet good of both sorts, are made and sold very cheap in China. . . . I know not a more profitable Commodity.
Lockyer would buy tubs of ketchup and soy and draw off the sauces into bottles for the return journey. The expensive bottled ketchup quickly became a prestige product in England. The great expense of this Asian import soon led to recipes in British and then American cookbooks for cooks attempting to make their own ketchup, imitating the taste of the expensive imported original. Ketchup wasn’t the only attempt to counterfeit a luxury Asian import. Worcestershire sauce was created later in the nineteenth cen
tury to imitate a sauce from Bengal, and budget replacements for arrack were also developed, using local sugar in the Caribbean. You probably know the most popular of these imitation arracks: it is called “rum.”
Here’s a ketchup recipe from a 1742 London cookbook in which the fish sauce has already taken on a very British flavor, with “eschallots” (shallots) and mushrooms:
To Make KATCH-UP that will keep good Twenty Years.
Take a Gallon of strong stale Beer, one Pound of Anchovies wash’d and clean’d from the Guts, half an Ounce of Mace, half an Ounce of Cloves, a quarter of an Ounce of Pepper, three large Races of Ginger, one Pound of Eschallots, and one Quart of flap Mushrooms well rubb’d and pick’d; boil all these over a slow Fire till it is half wasted, and strain it thro’ a Flannel Bag; let it stand till it is quite cold, then bottle and stop it very close. . . . This is thought to exceed what is brought from India.
The mushrooms that played a supporting role in this early recipe soon became a main ingredient, and from 1750 to 1850 the word ketchup began to mean any number of thin dark sauces made of mushrooms or even walnuts, often used to flavor melted butter. Jane Austen’s family seemed to prefer this new walnut ketchup, and the household book kept by Jane’s friend Martha Lloyd while she lived with Jane’s family in Chawton tells us they made it by pounding green walnuts with salt and then boiling the mash with vinegar, cloves, mace, ginger, nutmeg, pepper, horseradish, and shallots.
It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that people first began to add tomato to ketchups, probably first in Britain. This early recipe from 1817 still has the anchovies that betray its fish sauce ancestry:
Tomata Catsup
Gather a gallon of fine, red, and full ripe tomatas; mash them with one pound of salt; let them rest for three days, press off the juice, and to each quart add a quarter of a pound of anchovies, two ounces of shallots, and an ounce of ground black pepper; boil up together for half an hour, strain through a sieve, and put to it the following spices; a quarter of an ounce of mace, the same of allspice and ginger, half an ounce of nutmeg, a drachm of coriander seed, and half a drachm of cochineal; pound all together; let them simmer gently for twenty minutes, and strain through a bag: when cold, bottle it, adding to each bottle a wineglass of brandy. It will keep for seven years.
By the mid-1850s, tastes changed and anchovies seem to disappear from the recipes. After the Civil War, manufacturers in America responded to the greatly increased demand by increasing ketchup production, tailoring their recipes to American consumers who began to prefer their ketchup a bit sweeter and thicker than the British. By around 1910 manufacturers like Heinz found that adding even more sugar and also lots of vinegar helped produce a ketchup that preserved better, leading to our modern sweet-and-sour formula. The spelling was another common difference between Britain and America; while both spellings were used in both countries, ketchup was more common in Britain and catsup in America, until about 30 years ago, when ketchup took over here as well. (Heinz originally chose the spelling “ketchup” to distinguish the product from competitors’ “catsup,” but when Heinz began to dominate the market other manufacturers switched to Heinz’s spelling.)
The Chinese origins of our national sauce aren’t just a fun bit of culinary trivia—ketchup’s history offers us new insights into global economic history. If you subscribe to a traditional Western model of Asian economics, China turned inward in 1450 during the Ming dynasty and became isolated and economically irrelevant, leading to stagnation and a low standard of living until the West finally dragged Asia into the world economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
But the vast production and trade of ke-tchup (not to mention arrack and less delicious goods like textiles and porcelain) well into the eighteenth century tell a different tale. The late economist Andre G. Frank and scholars like Kenneth Pomerantz and Robert C. Allen have shown that while the Chinese government did ban private sea trade, these bans were repeatedly rescinded, and in any case were simply ignored by Hokkien sailors, who continued to sail and trade illegally on a massive scale. Charles Lockyer, for example, complains throughout his memoir about intense competition from the Chinese, describing, in every country he visited, harbors crowded with Chinese ships packed with goods, trading voluminously from China along every coast and island east to Indonesia and west as far as Burma.
Fujianese pirates also played a huge role in this trade. Chinese officials repeatedly complained that the entire city of Amoy was given over to pirates. The private navy of the Fujianese warlord Zheng Chenggong was the largest navy in Asia, conquering Taiwan from the Dutch East Indies Company in 1662 and trading enormous quantities of silk and porcelain to the west for Spanish silver.
In fact, by the time British sailors brought ketchup back to England in the late seventeenth century, China was the richest nation in the world by any measure—including standard of living, life span, and per capita income—and produced the bulk of the whole world’s GNP. China’s control of intra-Asia trade together with its superior manufacturing technology (in textiles, clothing, ceramics, and distillation) meant that China dominated the world economy until the Industrial Revolution.
These facts explain why the Portuguese, British, and Dutch were so eager to get to Asia: most of the world’s trade took place only there. But Europe had no manufacturing base that was comparable to Asia’s until 1800. All Europe had to offer in exchange for Asia’s considerable luxury goods were gold and silver from the new colonial mines that had been established in Bolivia, Peru, and Mexico. The mines, discovered in the sixteenth century and worked by Andean and African slaves, produced the silver for vast floods of Spanish silver reals of eight. Silver was the only thing the Chinese government would accept, and Spanish silver pieces of eight became the first international currency, the dollar of its time, explaining why Edmund Scott had jars of them buried under his warehouse in Java in 1604.
It wasn’t just the larcenous Chinese tavern-keeper next door who had designs on those silver reals. The Manila galleons carrying silver from Acapulco to Manila were under constant attack from pirates. These included the Fujianese pirate Zheng Chenggong mentioned above (the warlord also known as Koxinga) whose vast pirate armada let him conquer Taiwan from the Dutch and almost invade the Philippines. English and Dutch pirates were after them as well, including Sir Francis Drake, who captured tons of silver from the Spanish treasure ships and coastal cities of Peru and Chile before landing in 1579 just north of San Francisco at Drake’s Bay and claiming “New Albion” for England. In the other direction, the great Spanish treasure fleet carrying silver reals as well as silk and porcelain from Veracruz to Spain was targeted by the original pirates of the Caribbean, represented in my childhood by Stevenson’s Long John Silver whose parrot Cap’n Flint would screech out “Pieces of Eight! Pieces of Eight! Pieces of Eight!” until he was out of breath.
The silver real was de facto currency for the British colonies as well, circulated widely even in the United States well into the nineteenth century. (In the 1960s when I was reading Treasure Island, a quarter was still called “two bits,” a usage that dates back to small silver coins that were worth one-eighth of a Spanish real.)
Europeans sent vast numbers of these silver reals of eight back to Asia to buy high-quality Asian-manufactured silk, cotton, porcelain, arrack, soy, and prestigious ketchup. As Charles Mann argues in his book 1493, it was thus the Chinese desire for silver, and Europe’s desire for Asian exports, that drove Europe’s intense phase of exploration and colonization in the New World. The encounter between Western appetites and Eastern products created our modern “world-spanning interconnected civilizations,” to borrow Mann’s phrase.
The story of ketchup—from the fermented fish sauces of China and Southeast Asia to the sushi of Japan to our modern sweet tomato chutney—is, after all, a story of globalization and of centuries of economic domination by a world superpower. But the superpower isn’t America, and the century isn’t ours. Think of thos
e little plastic ketchup packets under the seat of your car as a reminder of China’s domination of the global world economy for most of the last millennium.
Five
A Toast to Toast
SAN FRANCISCO HAS always been a pretty good town for drinking to someone’s health. I already introduced the Pisco punch, made from Pisco brandy, lemon juice, and pineapple syrup that people toasted with after the gold rush. These days on sunny afternoons I’m fond of clinking glasses with a michelada, a Mexican summer beer cocktail with fresh lime juice, hot sauce, and—if you're lucky—a dusting of the chili lime powder called “salsa en polvo” (salsa powder):
Michelada
1¼ ounces fresh squeezed key lime juice
½ teaspoon hot sauce
½ teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
½ teaspoon chamoy (fruity chili sauce)
½ teaspoon Maggi
1 Negro Modela (or a Pacifico if it’s very hot outside)
ice cubes to fill a tall glass
Mexican chili lime powder (like Tajín) (optional; for the glass rim)
Rub a lime around the rim of a tall chilled glass and then dip the rim in chili lime powder. In a small jar or shaker, mix the rest of the ingredients, add to the glass with ice, and top with beer.
Unusual cocktails mixed with fresh herbs and fruits and a mix of alcohols are quite the rage all across the country recently. The Chamomile High Club at Maven in the Lower Haight mixes hop-forward India Pale Ale with bourbon and flavors of lemon, chamomile, and apricot. (Hops are a preservative, and the extra hops of India Pale Ale originally helped it stand up to the long journey to India in the stifling hot cargo holds.) Or you can have all the flavors from one bottle with Fernet Branca, the Italian bitters that every bar serves here, flavored with chamomile, elderflower, galangal, aloe, myrrh, and other herbs.