Catch Up on This

[deckardcanine]

While ketchup’s quite the omnipresent condiment these days,
Its origin is hard to trace, with linguists in a haze.
One source proposed a cognate of the French word escaveche,
Akin to escabeche, but the theory isn’t fresh.

A popular idea pertains to Cantonese keh-jup,
A clipped term for tomato sauce, but this does not add up,
For early ketchups didn’t use tomatoes in the least,
In keeping with their rarity at that time in the East.

In Britain, they would commonly use mushrooms as their base.
You could resort to oysters if you’d like a change of pace,
Or mussels, egg whites, walnuts, lemons, grapes, or kidney beans.
Most anything with vinegar could use the name, it seems.

Historians more often look to Hokkien kê-tsiap,
A brine of pickled seafood where the British tars might stop.
Relatedly, Malay kicap applies to soy-based sauce,
And likewise Indonesian kecap gets that across.