RECIPE
Eighteenthcentury mushroom ketchup
ELEANOR BARNETT shares her instructions for making a flavourful sauce with roots in south-east Asia
The chances are that when you think of ketchup it’s a thick tomato sauce - a store-cupboard staple that goes particularly well with Friday night’s fish and chips or slathered on an American-style hamburger.
As you might suspect, this type of ketchup is a relatively modern invention. Although tomatoes were first domesticated in what is now Mexico and transported to Europe following Spanish colonisation in the 1500s, they took a few hundred years to be fully incorporated into local cuisines. In fact, tomato ketchup wasn’t sold commercially until the mid-19th century, with the famous Heinz brand only launching in Pennsylvania in 1876.
The original ‘ketchup’ actually hails from south-east Asia, where which was used to refer to the brine of pickled fish as far back as the sixth century AD. The first English-language recipes date from the 17th century, when British travellers and sailors encountered the sauce in the far east and were inspired to create their own versions back at home.
