Tomato ketchup: A condiment that was once used as a medicine

Tomato ketchup has been an inseparable part of our day-to-day meals. Can you imagine relishing those crispy fries or enjoying those crunchy pakoras, without a bowl of tomato ketchup? The answer is no, we are sure. But do you know that this sweet-sour sauce was first invented as medication and not as a condiment? 

How ketchup evolved! 
The history of ketchup is hard to pin down. However, food experts and scholars believe that its origin can be traced back to China wherein it was known as Ge-thcup or Koe-cheup, which was basically a fish sauce. This fermented sauce was made from fish innards and soybeans. Also, it was salty and had a pungent smell.  

By 1736, the sauce had some more twists in the recipe. People started making it by boiling stale beer and some anchovies, which were fermented and later relished as a sauce. Then this recipe went through further changes when sailors took it to England. There, it went through several other experiments.  

But the first known published tomato ketchup recipe appeared in 1812, written by scientist and horticulturalist, James Mease who is also credited with inventing tomato-based ketchup.  

Ketchup was used as medicine 
In the 1830s, tomato ketchup used to be sold as a medicine, claiming to cure ailments like diarrhoea, indigestion, and jaundice. The idea was first proposed by Dr. John Cook Bennett, an American physician, in 1834, who is said to sell the recipe later in form of 'tomato pills'.  

The tomato pill craze 
All of you know that tomatoes are a vegetable, right?. But, botanically speaking, they are fruits. However, tomatoes are treated as a vegetable in the culinary realm. In fact, they are the second most popular vegetable, after potatoes today, suggest some estimates. Now, let’s turn on the time machine and go back by some 200 years ago. Back then, tomatoes used to be found in a flower pot rather than on a dinner plate. Gardeners would grow ornamental tomatoes because they thought these looked interesting. But few thought to actually eat them. 

However, once Dr. Bennet’s pills hit the market claiming medicinal properties of tomatoes, brigades of copycats began selling their own tomato-based pills initiating a tomato pill war.  

Unfortunately, some of these copycats simply sold laxatives with no trace of tomatoes. They also made wild claims that their pills could cure everything from scurvy, a condition caused by vitamin C deficiency to brittle bones. Due to these false claims, the ketchup medicine empire collapsed in 1850. 

A condiment, not a medicine  
The end of tomato pills didn’t mean that the product as a whole went away, though. Decades later, in 1876, Henry Heinz, an American entrepreneur came up with today’s version of tomato ketchup by creating it with ripe tomatoes, distilled vinegar, brown sugar, salt, and a variety of spices. This recipe gained traction as a non-medicinal condiment and was first introduced as "catsup" in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.