Today, when you sprinkle a good dose of ketchup on a few fries that are too dry, there is little chance that this gesture is intended to cure some ailments in your body. If not to bring you a good dose of comfort and sugar.
However, this was not always the case. Ketchup indeed hides a little-known past. Before ending up on your plate, the famous tomato-based sauce was in fact… a medicine. And you will see it, in the 19the century, we had a lot of imagination and little scientific expertise.
From Oriental ketsiap to a pill against diarrhea
Let’s go back a little. In the 18th centurye century, British sailors brought back from the Orient a fermented sauce, which seemed as strange as it was tasty to them: ketsiap. This mixture of fish brine, oysters, spices and soy has virtually nothing to do with today’s red sauce… and doesn’t even contain tomatoes.
However, it is this strange mixture that will become the ketchup that we know today. Just after a slight makeover, where exotic ingredients are replaced by local dishes, shallots and mushrooms in the lead. The sauce quietly lived its life until the beginning of the 19th century.e century, a key date when… tomatoes were added. Eureka!
So far, so good, you might say. However, everything went to hell in the 1830s. An American doctor, Doctor John Cook Bennett, saw a medical vocation in this latest version of the sauce. For what? Because this president of the department of medicine at Willoughby University, in Ohio, is convinced of the therapeutic virtues of the tomato, which he considers devilishly effective against jaundice, digestive disorders, indigestion and… diarrhea.
Sauce that can
The Dr John Cook Bennett could have simply recommended eating tomatoes. It would have been too simple. He prefers, instead, to concentrate their benefits in a more convenient form: ketchup-based pills. In 1834, the ketchup pills are landing on the counters of American apothecaries. Before long, competitors were launching other versions of these little pills, going so far as to claim that they relieve rheumatism and make the flu go away. A nice concoction of lies?
Looking closer, the tomato certainly has advantages. The presence of lycopene, an antioxidant, for example, has benefits for the body… But, apart from exaggerating the medical benefits, that’s about it! And if we look at ketchup in particular, the presence of lycopene is almost anecdotal (unlike sugar, which is overflowing in modern industrial versions). The therapeutic use being zero, the medical fad eventually ran out of steam, before being completely abandoned.
It was not until 1876 that ketchup made a comeback. No longer as a medicine for diarrhea, but as a food sauce. Henry John Heinz, who founded the famous food company of the same name, perfected the recipe by adding a large dose of sugar, which softened the taste, but also preserved the sauce better. This revisited version made it a worldwide success, reaching Europe in 1886, first in London, then… in 1944 in Paris, in the suitcases of American soldiers.
Coca-Cola with cocaine and 7Up antidepressant
The story of ketchup is far from being an isolated case. Worse, there are products we consume today with even crazier stories. You probably know the story of Coca-Cola, once sold as a brain stimulant and remedy for migraines. A sort of tonic… which worked really well! And for good reason, until the beginning of the 20the century, it contained cocaine.
Less known is the story of 7Up. This soda was formerly called, when it was launched in 1929, the “Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda”. A name that is far too long, which, to put it simply, wants to tell you precisely that it contains lithium citrate. For what? Because the latter was then considered a mood stabilizer used in psychiatry. It was enough for the drink to be sold as a miracle cure for mild depression. Until lithium was finally withdrawn in 1950, when health authorities began to regulate the use of psychoactive substances.
