Ketchup

Ketchup or catsup is a table condiment with a sweet and sour flavor. "Ketchup" now typically refers to tomato ketchup, although early recipes for different varieties contained mushrooms, oysters, mussels, egg whites, grapes, or walnuts, among other ingredients.

Tomato ketchup is made from tomatoes, sugar, and vinegar, with seasonings and spices. The spices and flavors vary but commonly include onions, allspice, coriander, cloves, cumin, garlic, mustard and sometimes include celery, cinnamon, or ginger.^{[citation needed]} Tomato ketchup is often used as a condiment for dishes that are usually served hot, and are fried or greasy: e.g., french fries and other potato dishes, hamburgers, hot dogs, chicken tenders, hot sandwiches, meat pies, cooked eggs, and grilled or fried meat.

Ketchup is sometimes used as the basis for, or as one ingredient in, other sauces and dressings, and the flavor may be replicated as an additive flavoring for snacks, such as potato chips.

The term used for the sauce varies. Ketchup is the dominant term in American English and Canadian English, although catsup is commonly used in some southern US states and Mexico.

In Canada and the US, tomato sauce is not a synonym for ketchup but is a sauce made from tomatoes and commonly used in making sauce for pasta.

The etymology of the word ketchup is unclear; there are multiple competing theories:

A popular folk etymology is that the word came from the Amoy (Xiamen) region of China into English, as a borrowed word 茄汁 (ke² zap¹, Cantonese, meaning "tomato sauce"; the character 茄 means 'eggplant'; tomato in Chinese is 番茄, so the phrase literally translates to foreign eggplant sauce).

Another theory among academics is that the word derives from one of two words from Hokkien of the Fujian region of coastal southern China: kôe-chiap (in the Amoy / Xiamen dialect and Quanzhou dialect) or kê-chiap (in the Zhangzhou dialect). Both of these pronunciations of the same word (膎汁, kôe-chiap / kê-chiap) come from the Quanzhou dialect, Amoy dialect, and Zhangzhou dialect of Hokkien, respectively, where it meant the brine of pickled fish or shellfish (膎, 'pickled food' (usually seafood) + 汁, 'juice'). There are citations of koe-chiap in the Chinese-English Dictionary of the Vernacular or Spoken Language of Amoy (1873) by Carstairs Douglas, defined as "brine of pickled fish or shell-fish."