As a wise man with an ice-cream cone tattooed on his face once said, “If you don’t have the sauce, then you’re lost. But you can also get lost in the sauce.” We never really understood what that meant — until we discovered the bizarre history of ketchup. Now up is down, back is forward, and there’s nothing but ketchup as far as the mind’s eye can see. Just take this single fact, for starters: The first ketchup had nothing to do with tomatoes.
Distant Origins
Doesn’t sound like something you’d put on a burger, does it? That’s because it wasn’t. Instead, it was meant as an additive to soups, other sauces, and to ladle over fish. Of course, it seems like pretty much anything could have been called “ketchup” in those days — it was used to describe everything from Indonesian soy sauce to tamarind chutneys to vinegary pastes of unripe nuts. If you had a wall of ketchups like that to choose from these days, it might feel a little bit like Russian (dressing) roulette. Fortunately, industrialization came in to codify ketchup and cement it in condiment history.
(Way More Than) 57 Varieties
In 1905, ketchup changed for good, forever. Henry J. Heinz was convinced that if he could make a preservative-free ketchup that would last in the icebox, he could tap into an untapped desire. He did it by using full, ripe tomatoes instead of scraps from the cannery floor, and increasing the vinegar content to never-bef0re-seen levels. Once a door-to-door horseradish salesman, he transformed the foodscape overnight and launched a culinary empire.
In 1896, the Heinz company was packaging more than 60 different products, including some wonderfully 1890s-sounding dishes like plum pudding, India relish, euchred pickle, currant jelly, and celery soup. That was also the year that Heinz, riding a train in New York City, spotted an advertisement for a shoe store with “21 styles” of shoes. He was smitten with the specificity of the number, and after some thinking, settled on “57” as the perfect number to describe how many food products his company produced. So no, there have never been 57 varieties of ketchup at Heinz — but they’ve been producing far more than 57 varieties for more than 100 years.
