Name: The Fishy Origins of Ketchup
Uploaded: 2019-01-23T09:50:31.000Z
Duration: 2 min 17 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

It's basically the red in red, white, and blue, right?

And that red, clearly is from the tomatoes the ketchup is made from.

The first recorded recipe for ketchup comes from China.

And for more than a thousand years, it wasn't even made with tomatoes.

Fish intestine, bladder, and stomach all mixed together with salt, then sealed and heated in the hot summer sun for 20 days.

That was the original ketchup, a fermented fish paste that dates back to 6th century China.

It was popular throughout Southeast Asia, and British and Dutch settlers who arrived in the 1600s loved the stuff.

Over time, they brought ketchup home to Europe and added their own modifications including beer, mushrooms, walnuts, oysters, strawberries, and peaches.

By the mid-1700s, English ketchup was a mainstay on British dinner tables;

and as colonists went west, it soon made its way across the pond.

And it's rumored Europeans once believed they were poisonous, but poisonous they were not.

In 1812, a Philadelphia horticulturalist and scientist by the name of James Mease introduced tomatoes into the mix.

He published a tomato ketchup recipe that was the beginning of a new crimson era.

From there, many different iterations were concocted.

And by the end of the 18th century, the New York Tribune called tomato ketchup"America's national condiment that was on every table in the land."

And I, for one, don't miss the fish guts.