Important debate needs YOU to determine the correct spelling

Is it Ketchup or Catsup

And more importantly why did someone invent a Catsup Crapper

http://www.catsupcrapper.com/

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-ket2.htm


Ketchup was one of the earliest names given to this condiment, so spelled in Charles Lockyer’s book of 1711, An Account of the Trade in India: “Soy comes in Tubbs from Jappan, and the best Ketchup from Tonquin; yet good of both sorts are made and sold very cheap in China”. Nobody seems quite sure where it comes from, and I won’t bore you with a long disquisition concerning the scholarly debate on the matter, which is reflected in the varied origins given in major dictionaries. It’s likely to be from a Chinese dialect, imported into English through Malay. The original was a kind of fish sauce, though the modern Malay and Indonesian version, with the closely related name kecap, is a sweet soy sauce.

Like their Eastern forerunners, Western ketchups were dipping sauces. I’m told the first ketchup recipe appeared in Elizabeth Smith’s book The Compleat Housewife of 1727 and that it included anchovies, shallots, vinegar, white wine, sweet spices (cloves, ginger, mace, nutmeg), pepper and lemon peel. Not a tomato in sight, you will note — tomato ketchup was not introduced until about a century later, in the US, and caught on only slowly. It was more usual to base the condiment on mushrooms, or sometimes walnuts.

The confusion about names started even before Charles Lockyer wrote about it, since there is an entry dated 1690 in the Dictionary of the Canting Crew which gives it as catchup, which is another Anglicisation of the original Eastern term. Catchup was used much more in North America than in Britain: it was still common in the middle years of the nineteenth century, as in a story in Scribner’s Magazine in 1859: “I do not object to take a few slices of cold boiled ham ... with a little mushroom catchup, some Worcester sauce, and a pickle or so”. Indeed, catchup continued to appear in American works for some decades and is still to be found on occasion.

There were lots of other spellings, too, of which catsup is the best known, a modification of catchup. You can blame Jonathan Swift for it if you like, since he used it first in 1730: “And, for our home-bred British cheer, Botargo, catsup, and caveer”. That form was also once common in the US but is much less so these days, at least on bottle labels: all the big US manufacturers now call their product ketchup.

By the subtitle on my ketchup/catsup labels: "fancy catsup". Is there any other kind? Has anyone ever seen "plain" catsup?

By gum, I want some minimalist catsup here! Enough with the fancy-schmancy stuff.

John Kerry's running mate was John Edwards who pays $400 for a haircut

You do the math

Trader Joe's has an organic ketchup that has NO High Fructose Corn Syrup. Woo-hoo!

IMHO, of course.

to build a fake bomb belt had already been taken!

How come they call it "ketchup" sometimes and "catsup" other times?
18-Mar-1983

Dear Cecil:

How come the bottled red stuff you see in stores is sometimes called ketchup and sometimes catsup? It all looks the same to me. --George Steinfeld, Dallas, Texas

Cecil replies:

There is an interesting answer for this, George, and then there is the real answer. The interesting answer is that our word ketchup, which originally meant a spicy fish sauce, comes from the Malay kechap, which Dutch traders transliterated as ketjap. But it turns out the Malays had borrowed the word from the Chinese ke-tsiap, which I gather sounds more like catsup. So you could argue that European merchants called their spicy fish sauce ketchup or catsup depending on whether they'd bought it in Malaya or China.

Unfortunately, it appears the Chinese themselves had two versions of the word, ke-tsiap and koe-chiap. So the real answer, unless some 17th-century Chinese shows up to clarify things, is that we just don't know why there are two versions, there just are. As a kid I used to get mad when my father fed me that line, but I'm starting to understand how the old guy felt.

--CECIL ADAMS

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_102a.html

:silly: