Tomato ketchup

Perhaps the most popular and famous sauces around the world can be considered mustard, mayonnaise and, of course, his majesty ketchup. The first ketchup began to be made in ancient China. However, that first sauce had little in common with modern tomato ketchup. In the original version of the Chinese sauce recipe, which entered England thanks to sailors, there were such ingredients as: mushrooms, walnuts, beans, garlic, spices, wine, shellfish, salted fish juice and anchovies.

As you can see, no tomatoes were mentioned in the recipe for ancient ketchup, which was found in written sources dating back to the 17th century. Tomato ketchup got its original name thanks to the English name ketchup. Historians argue that such a name for the sauce was not chosen at all by chance. It's all about translating the name of the famous sauce. As it turned out, the English name came from Chinese, where the sound kōe means "fish" and the word sauce sounds like tsiap.

As a result, the English sailors reproduced the Chinese phrase fish sauce in their own way and turned out to be ketchup. The first tomato ketchup recipes begin to appear in the European culinary tradition from around the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It was at the turn of these centuries that European as well as American culinary experts began to pay increased attention to ketchup. It was then that the classic recipe for tomato ketchup appeared. And it appeared not somewhere, but in the United States. As it turned out, American industrialists have long discussed the possibility of using the food additive sodium benzoate in the food industry.

The famous Henry J. Heinz was able to convince everyone that his tomato ketchup, as well as the exclusive technology of the product, is the future of the food industry. So it happened since the method of producing ketchup from tomato paste by vacuum evaporation without temperature impact became an innovation in the food industry of that time. Such tomato ketchup could retain its taste, as well as consumer characteristics, for longer.

Over time, Heinz's tomato ketchup technology has been perfected, and the trademark of the American food giant "H. J. Heinz" is still flourishing and annually releases thousands of tones of first-class tomato ketchup to the global market. It is worth noting that tomato ketchup, in addition to a large army of fans, has many ill-wishers who claim that not every product will benefit human health.

It is noteworthy that opponents of tomato ketchup not only unfounded argue about the dangers of the product, support their statements with the results of scientific research. It's all about the chemical composition of mass-produced tomato ketchup. Many manufacturers do not particularly monitor the quality of their product and try to reduce production costs. For this reason, most varieties of tomato ketchup contain food additives and starch.