Talk:Ketchup

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Etymology

The etymology section in this article is within the scope of the Etymology task force, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of etymology on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.EtymologyWikipedia:WikiProject Linguistics/EtymologyTemplate:Etymology sectionEtymology

Ketchup was a good article, but it was removed from the list as it no longer met the good article criteria at the time. There are suggestions below for improving the article. If you can improve it, please do; it may then be renominated.
Review: January 12, 2006. (Reviewed version).

Why is the place of origin the UK?

The ancient origin of the name and various sauces is Asia/China.

The modern thick tomato recipe that has remained mostly unchanged came from Heinz in Pennsylvania.

Why is the UK picked? Is it simply when the sauce entered the west? 73.55.213.196 (talk) 22:20, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Kurlansky discusses this in Salt: A World History and how it derived from an Asian anchovie sauce. However, the way "fish sauce" was used in the paragraph makes no sense and needs to be properly introduced and written up. Not just randomly throw in something about fish sauce ("In a 1742 London cookbook, the fish sauce had already taken on a very British flavor, ..." ) without explaining how it relates to mushroom ketchup; that's just sloppy. See: https://littleacregourmet.com/blogs/news/61026885-ketchup-comes-from-where#:~:text=According%20to%20Salt%3A%20A%20World,centuries%20as%20%22love%20apples%22)%3A Further, this isn't even referenced in the mushroom ketchup main article. Again, this article needs help to explain this part of its history. Vargob (talk) 03:38, 26 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, it seems like someone decided to erase that Asians invented ketchup and attribute it to white British in the "history" section. Older versions of this article had a much better/accurate/true "history" section. 2601:980:8000:25B2:0:0:0:1007 (talk) 19:59, 15 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

You mean white Asians, right? Chinese in China don't consider themselves to have "color", nor do Japanese and Koreans. The facts that China had (a) north-south hegemony over darker-skinned parts of Asia, and (b) written records kept earlier and clearer don't constitute definitive proof that Chinese in China originated the condiment. They could well have encountered it while trading (see Sea_cucumber#Relation_to_humans for example) and then written about it. Martindo (talk) 05:09, 26 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It's extremely unclear to me how this screed, which seems to be in response to British being referred to as "white" is relevant to the origins of ketchup.

Can you bring us back there? NdotoYaKenya (talk) 23:05, 14 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The suggestion that ketchup is American and British in origin is absolutely crazy to me; especially considering that the word itself is documented as having a Chinese etymology, and first is recorded being used to describe a Southern Chinese sauce.

This is just completely ahistorical.

Is there anybody here who wishes to defend this state of affairs? NdotoYaKenya (talk) 23:09, 14 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Missing: The Ketchup King

The present article seems to get all of its history from Heinz, which makes it one-sided. About the same time that Heinz started bottling ketchup, there was another large tomato ketchup manufacturer in the New Jersey suburbs of New York City, the E.C. Hazard Company, that won awards for their product in national and international competitions. I don't have access to their production records to compare with Heinz's, but the engraving at https://monmouthtimeline.org/timeline/e-c-hazards-state-of-the-art-ketchup-factory-is-destroyed-by-fire/ shows the immensity of their factory in 1888. In local histories, it is reported that at dawn each day in the summer, farmers would line up with their wagons full of tomatoes, drive them up a ramp, dump the tomatoes down a chute, and drive away, and this went on for hours - so we're not talking about a small mom & pop operation. Unfortunately, 1888 was also the year that factory burned down. The plant was immediately rebuilt, but the business later went bankrupt in the Panic of 1907, and only at that point did Heinz become the largest surviving company in the business.

Wikipedia has a biographical page on E.C. Hazard ( https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/E._C._Hazard_and_Company ), which contains the following quotation: "Hazard had a devotion to purity of his products and is credited with marketing the first pure and unadulterated ketchup." How can this article be complete without mentioning him?

How obsessive was E.C.about purity? The kettles in which he cooked his ketchup were lined with pure silver ( https://tworivertimes.com/the-ketchup-king-of-shrewsbury/ ). No wonder that he won awards. I'm not a historian, so I can't dig deeper into the history of his company, but I'm putting this out there so one of you ketchup experts can follow up on it if you're so inclined. 108.7.56.197 (talk) 17:44, 7 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

False statement

How the hell is pickling the tomatoes “not” a degradation of flavor? What person could not distinguish pickled vegetables from non-pickled ones? … It is very clear that the person that wrote this, has never cooked in her life, and exclusively eats hyper-processed fast “food”.
This kind of nonsense is exactly what could have been prevented, if the article was not locked down, in complete opposition to the whole point of Wikipedia.
As many have said before, I’ll say again: As long as Wikipedia is centralized, it’s a failed project (that hasn’t accepted its own failure yet).
— 2A0A:A546:4DFB:1:BD86:6B8C:9D84:4CE6 (talk) 11:12, 21 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Terminology

The Terminology section only mentions US and Canada. The terms used in other countries should be mentioned as well (i.e. Australia tends to use tomato sauce) --188.23.236.110 (talk) 18:57, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Etymology

Why would the name Ketchup come from Asia if the sauce's origin is from the United Kingdom or the United States? Alexysun (talk) 19:21, 8 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The Etymology section presents the Asian word influences and complex, competing origins of the name that became ketchup, summarized here. The History section is about the UK and US dominance in manufacturing that led to the common ketchup varieties of today. Zefr (talk) 19:56, 8 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]