I Had Never Really Thought About Where Ketchup Came From,

then whilst looking for something totally different I found out,

the story starts more than 500 years ago, it all started in China, in Fujian province, the humid coastal region that also gave us the word “tea” (from Fujianese te), Fujianese-built ships sailed as far as Persia and Madagascar and took Chinese seamen and settlers to ports throughout Southeast Asia, down along the Mekong River, Khmer and Vietnamese fishermen introduced them to their fish sauce, a pungent liquid with a beautiful caramel colour that they made (and still make) out of salted and fermented anchovies,

this fish sauce is now called nuoc mam in Vietnamese or nam pla in Thai, but the Chinese seamen called it ke-tchup, “preserved-fish sauce” in Hokkien—the language of southern Fujian and Taiwan, Fujianese settlers took ke-tchup with them to Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, when Dutch and British merchants came to Southeast Asia around 1600 seeking spices, textiles and porcelain, they quickly began to buy immense quantities of arrack from the Chinese, the drink of sailors before rum had become popular, it was that while buying all these barrels of arrack from Chinese merchants in Indonesia, British sailors also acquired a taste for ke-tchup, by the turn of the 18th century, fish sauce and arrack had become as profitable for British merchants as they were for Chinese traders,

in 1703, British merchant Charles Lockyer traveled to Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, China, and India, 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, here is Lockyer’s advice on buying ketchup or soy sauce in China or Tonkin (“Tonqueen”, i.e., northern Vietnam)

Soy comes in Tubs from Jappan, and the best Ketchup from Tonqueen; yet good of both sorts, are made and sold very cheap in China. … I know not a more profitable Commodity.

the sauce soon became popular in the UK then made the jump across to the States, where perhaps the most popular tomato sauce is made today by Heinz, after all of that I do not like ketchup, as an aside I was not going to do the ketchup joke, but here it is,

one day there were three tomatoes walking down the street, a mama tomato, a daddy tomato and a baby tomato, baby tomato is walking too slowly, so the daddy tomato goes back, jumps on him and squashes him into a paste and says 'ketchup!' Boom-Boom!