Monday, June 4, 2012

Ketchup = fish sauce? Well, it was originally a Hokkien word...

There's this claim that ketchup (sometimes spelled "catsup") is derived from a Southern Min (now Hokkien, Teochew, etc) word that means "pickled fish sauce"!

It seems, says this American blogger, that Chinese sea-farers from coastal areas such as Fujian province had learnt about making delicious fish sauce from coastal folks along the Mekong region of Southeast Asia.

He says the Southern Min called their culinary rendition ke-tchap. Anyway, when the angmohs came to trade with Imperial China (and later to carve it up), they liked "ke-tchap" so much that they took the recipe back to England and America.

Later, they found it too expensive to use imported pickled fish and used walnuts or mushrooms instead. Then, later, tomato-based ketchup was invented. If you find all this too fishy to believe, here's an extract from the blog, which incidentally also featured in today's ST Life ("Ketchup comes from China", page C2)...

...between about 1300 and 1800 vast numbers of Southern Min speakers (Hokkien and Teochiu) sailed between China and Southeast Asia, trading and settling in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Burma, and the Philippines, exactly the regions that today use fish sauce. The Chinese traders presumably picked up fish sauce from mainland south-east Asia along the Mekong river where it was developed by the Vietnamese and Khmer, and spread it to China, the Philippines, and Indonesia. The British encountered these Chinese in Indonesia or elsewhere in Southeast Asia, borrowed the word ketchup, brought it home, and started right in on messing with the recipe.

If you want to read this rather longish blog itself, here it is...

http://languageoffood.blogspot.sg/2009/09/ketchup.html

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