Tomato ketchup

Ketchup, also known as catsup, ketsup, red sauce, and tomato sauce, is a sauce used as a condiment. Originally, recipes used egg whites, mushrooms, oysters, mussels, or walnuts, among other ingredients, but now the unmodified term usually refers to tomato ketchup. Ketchup is a sweet and tangy sauce now typically made from tomatoes, sugar, and vinegar, with assorted seasonings and spices. The specific spices and flavors vary, but commonly include onions, allspice, coriander, cloves, cumin, garlic, and mustard; and sometimes include celery, cinnamon or ginger. The market leader in the United States (60% market share) and United Kingdom (82%) is Heinz. Hunt's has the second biggest share of the US market with less than 20%. In much of the UK, Australia and New Zealand ketchup is also known as 'tomato sauce' (a term that means a fresher pasta sauce elsewhere in the world) or 'red sauce' (especially in Wales). Tomato ketchup is most often used as a condiment to dishes that are usually served hot and may be fried or greasy: french fries, hamburgers, hot dogs, chicken tenders, tater tots, hot sandwiches, meat pies, cooked eggs, and grilled or fried meat. Ketchup is sometimes used as the basis for, or as one ingredient in, other sauces and dressings, and the flavor may be replicated as an additive flavoring for snacks such as potato chips. In the 17th century, the Chinese mixed a concoction of pickled fish and spices and called it (in the Amoy dialect) kôe-chiap or kê-chiap (鮭汁, Mandarin Chinese guī zhī, Cantonese gwai1 zap1) meaning the brine of pickled fish (鮭, salmon; 汁, juice) or shellfish. By the early 18th century, the table sauce had arrived in the Malay states (present day Malaysia and Singapore), where English colonists first tasted it. The Malaysian-Malay word for the sauce was kicap or kecap (pronounced 'kay-chap'). That word evolved into the English word 'ketchup'. English settlers took ketchup with them to the American colonies. The term Catchup was used in 1690 in the Dictionary of the Canting Crew which was well acclaimed in North America. The spelling 'catchup' may have also been used in the past. In the United Kingdom, preparations of ketchup were historically and originally prepared with mushrooms as a primary ingredient, rather than tomatoes. Ketchup recipes began to appear in British and then American cookbooks in the 18th century. In a 1742 London cookbook, the fish sauce had already taken on a very British flavor, with the addition of shallots and mushrooms. The mushrooms soon became the 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. In the United States, mushroom ketchup dates back to at least 1770, and was prepared by British colonists in 'English speaking colonies in North America'. In contemporary times, mushroom ketchup is available in the UK, although it is not a commonly used condiment. Many variations of ketchup were created, but the tomato-based version did not appear until about a century later after other types. An early recipe for 'Tomata Catsup' from 1817 still has the anchovies that betray its fish-sauce ancestry: