July 6, 2026 • 11 mins
This all-American condiment got its start as a fermented fish sauce and featured in the formation of the Food and Drug Administration. Learn about the history of tomato ketchup -- and why it's so hard to get out of bottles -- in today's episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://recipes.howstuffworks.com/ketchup.htm
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey brain Stuff
Lauren Vogelbaum here. Ketchup is an all American condiment, a
reliable presence at cookouts, on diner tables, and in packets
at the bottom of fast food bags. As of twenty
twenty six, some eighty four percent of US households have
(00:24):
a bottle kicking around. But this condiment had thousands of
years of history before it came to us. The earliest
recipes are from ancient China. Ketchup traveled to Europe during
the era of colonization. By the end of the seventeen hundreds,
it was a British staple enjoyed by folks like Jane Austen,
but it wasn't the condiment you might know. Ketchups of
(00:48):
the time were thin, spiced sauces made with various main
ingredients like anchovies, walnuts, or celery, but not tomato. Tomato
ketchup was probably an American innovation in the early eighteen hundreds,
but only became really entrenched after the Civil War. Originally,
these ketchups were often used as ingredients in other sauces,
(01:11):
in dishes like savory pies, or in bastes for meat, fish,
and poultry during cooking, much like barbecue sauce. It wasn't
until the early twentieth century the ketchup was reinvented as
a condiment when hot dogs, hamburgers, and French fries entered
the American diet, and when Hines used tomato ketchup to
(01:31):
help fuel a movement that would result in the founding
of the US Food and Drug Administration. Today, let's talk
about all things ketchup. Savory sauces or pastes made by
salting and fermenting things like fish or soybeans go back
at least two to three thousand years in cultures all
(01:52):
over the world. It was a way to preserve some
of the nutrition and flavor of bountiful foods for leaner times.
Things like Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, miso, and Vietnamese fish
sauce are all descendants of these ancient products. Historians think
we got the word ketchup from a similar Ish Chinese
(02:13):
term meaning a brine of pickled fish. The ketchup was
first recorded in English in the sixteen eighties by British sailors,
traders and colonists. In Southeast Asia who were introduced to
local savory sauces and really liked them. By the seventeen forties,
English recipe books were awash with ketchups. These were thin,
(02:35):
dark sauces made with lots of posh spices like ginger, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, lemon, peel,
and black pepper, all mixed with vinegar or maybe white wine,
and steeped with some kind of main ingredient that needed
to get used up, things like oysters, anchovies, walnuts, plums,
or mushrooms. Jane Austen preferred mushroom ketchup. The sauces would
(02:59):
be allowed to sit for a few days to a
few weeks to ferment, and would then be strained and bottled. Meanwhile, tomatoes,
which are native to the Americas, were becoming part of
European and colonial cuisines. The first known recipe for tomato
ketchup was published in eighteen twelve by a Philadelphia doctor
and horticulturist by the name of James Nice. He called
(03:22):
tomatoes love apples, based on the French term for the
produce of palms d'ye moor. Tomatoes and their etymology whole
different episode anyway, tomatoes and ketchup made from them became
something of a health craze in the US over the
next few decades, and some companies tried to commercialize tomato ketchup.
But we didn't have really reliable sterilization or canning technology yet,
(03:47):
so those products and their preservatives weren't actually very good
for you. Enter Henry J. Hines. Hines was a businessman
out of Pittsburgh who had gotten his start bottling and
selling horseradish around the early eighteen seventies. He teamed up
with one doctor, Harvey Washington Wilie, who helped him create
(04:08):
clean manufacturing processes and quality control, and hired a food
scientist to tweak his recipes. Together, they came up with
a ketchup made from ripe red tomatoes with spices and
a lot of salt, vinegar, and sugar as preservatives. By
the eighteen nineties, Hines had a big condiment business going,
(04:29):
with at least fifty seven varieties of products, though that
exact number was probably just a random marketing thing. Hines
was a progressive boss. In the late eighteen hundreds, he
was giving his factory employees free access to medical and
dental care on site emergency care and life and death insurance.
(04:50):
The company provided uniforms, laundry service, washrooms, and on site
manicures to make sure employees came to the line clean.
The Pittsburgh had a swimming pool, jim and rooftop garden
like I sort of want to go bottle ketchup. In
the late eighteen hundreds in Pennsylvania, Hines was also marketing
(05:11):
this modern manufacturing process. He opened his factories to public tours.
He sold his products in clear glass bottles. He hired
traveling salesmen to display Hines products in local grocery stores
and espouse the quality of these foods. They were expensive,
but more pure and amidst all of this, doctor Wilie,
(05:33):
who by the turn of the century was the chief
chemist at the Federal Bureau of Chemistry, was on a
campaign to bring pure foods to the people by regulating
the increasingly industrial food supply. At that point, we didn't
have national consumer protection laws in place concerning food or drugs.
(05:53):
Producers didn't have to follow sanitation procedures, or label things
accurately or list their ingredients. There was growing public concern
about manufactured foods being adulterated or contaminated, and doctor Wilie
went on speaking tours railing against big business cost cutters
as the hosts of Satan and promoting a pure Food
(06:15):
Act as necessary for the survival of the human race.
This is ostensibly an episode about ketchup. Hines was a
big supporter of a pure Food Act. Of course, they
were already a corporate leader in sanitary manufacturing conditions. They
were ahead of the game there, but they also wanted
to help inspire greater public confidence in commercially prepared foods.
(06:39):
These issues had been simmering for decades, but then Upton
Sinclair's The Jungle came out in February of nineteen oh six,
revealing highly unsafe and unsanitary conditions in the meat packing industry.
It caused an uproar, and the Pure Food and Drug
Act passed in June that year. It proper labeling of
(07:01):
ingredients on packaging and paved the way for the Food
and Drug Administration to be created. Heine's business and their
Ketchup boomed by nineteen oh eight that sold two point
five million dollars worth of tomato based ketchup as it
became more popular alternate ingredient ketchups and home recipes faded
(07:21):
away in the US, though you can still find them
in other places. For example, the Philippines favors banana based ketchup.
But okay, we have to talk about the science of
ketchup and specifically how it flows or sometimes fails to flow.
A lot of technology over the years has gone into
(07:41):
getting ketchup out of its containers and onto your food.
This roots from the fact that ketchup is what's called
a non Newtonian fluid. Let's unpack that a Newtonian fluid
is one that has a viscosity, that is, a thickness
or resistance to flow related only to its temperature. Water
(08:04):
and oil are Newtonian fluids because pressure and agitation don't
affect the rate at which they flow, which is to
say that no matter how hard you shake water, it
always flows the same way. Viscosity is different than density.
Think of pouring honey versus cream into a cup of tea.
(08:25):
Honey is more viscous and more dense than water. It
takes longer to pour and it's heavier. You put it
in tea and it'll sink. Cream is more viscous but
less dense. It takes longer to pour than water, but
it floats in tea or at least mixes in anyway.
Unlike water and other Newtonian fluids, non Newtonian fluids are
(08:50):
affected by pressure and agitation. Think about quicksand we all
thought about quicksand right, it's about twice as dense as
you are, meaning that you can float on it, but
only if you don't struggle. If you struggle in quicksand
you agitate it and thus make it less viscous, and
you'll sink. That's why you should stay calm and move
(09:13):
slowly if you ever get trapped in quicksand or in toothpaste,
or in ketchup. More practically, though, you can put this
to use when you're trying to get ketchup out of
a glass bottle. It's so viscous that it gets jammed
up at the bottle's neck a butt. By applying agitation,
that is, sheer stress to the ketchup in the neck,
(09:35):
you can make it less viscous and it'll flow faster.
If you've got a bottle of Hinds, you do that
by tapping the neck of the bottle right on the
fifty seven label. For any other brand. It's right around
halfway up the neck. The reason that tapping the bottom
of the bottle doesn't work is because that only affects
the viscosity of the ketchup at the bottom, and that's
(09:57):
not where the problem is. Plastic squeeze bottles for Ketchup
were unveiled in nineteen eighty three, but tended to overshoot
the problem. The upside down squeeze bottles that debuted in
two thousand and two from both Hinds and Hunts, its
main us competitor, incorporate a clever silicone valve in the
lid to fix this problem. The valve has slits arranged
(10:21):
at right angles to each other, so they part when
you apply pressure via a squeeze to the bottle, and
then seal back up neatly when relaxed. The caps also
feature grooves that capture watery Ketchup juice and prevent it
from squirting out. Instead, it gets mixed back into the
body of the ketchup. However, it's packaged. Americans do devour
(10:45):
tomato Ketchup, but where not it's number one fans per capita,
Finland and Canada seem to be competing for who can
consume the most. Today's episode is based on the article
how Ketchup Works on how stuffworks dot Com written by
Melanie Redzeegy McManus, and on an episode of my other
(11:08):
podcast Saver called The Saucy History of Ketchup. Brain Stuff
is a production of iHeartRadio in partnership with how Stuffworks
dot Com and is produced by Tyler klang A. Four
more podcasts from my heart Radio. Visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey brain Stuff
Lauren Vogelbaum here. Ketchup is an all American condiment, a
reliable presence at cookouts, on diner tables, and in packets
at the bottom of fast food bags. As of twenty
twenty six, some eighty four percent of US households have
(00:24):
a bottle kicking around. But this condiment had thousands of
years of history before it came to us. The earliest
recipes are from ancient China. Ketchup traveled to Europe during
the era of colonization. By the end of the seventeen hundreds,
it was a British staple enjoyed by folks like Jane Austen,
but it wasn't the condiment you might know. Ketchups of
(00:48):
the time were thin, spiced sauces made with various main
ingredients like anchovies, walnuts, or celery, but not tomato. Tomato
ketchup was probably an American innovation in the early eighteen hundreds,
but only became really entrenched after the Civil War. Originally,
these ketchups were often used as ingredients in other sauces,
(01:11):
in dishes like savory pies, or in bastes for meat, fish,
and poultry during cooking, much like barbecue sauce. It wasn't
until the early twentieth century the ketchup was reinvented as
a condiment when hot dogs, hamburgers, and French fries entered
the American diet, and when Hines used tomato ketchup to
(01:31):
help fuel a movement that would result in the founding
of the US Food and Drug Administration. Today, let's talk
about all things ketchup. Savory sauces or pastes made by
salting and fermenting things like fish or soybeans go back
at least two to three thousand years in cultures all
(01:52):
over the world. It was a way to preserve some
of the nutrition and flavor of bountiful foods for leaner times.
Things like Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, miso, and Vietnamese fish
sauce are all descendants of these ancient products. Historians think
we got the word ketchup from a similar Ish Chinese
(02:13):
term meaning a brine of pickled fish. The ketchup was
first recorded in English in the sixteen eighties by British sailors,
traders and colonists. In Southeast Asia who were introduced to
local savory sauces and really liked them. By the seventeen forties,
English recipe books were awash with ketchups. These were thin,
(02:35):
dark sauces made with lots of posh spices like ginger, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, lemon, peel,
and black pepper, all mixed with vinegar or maybe white wine,
and steeped with some kind of main ingredient that needed
to get used up, things like oysters, anchovies, walnuts, plums,
or mushrooms. Jane Austen preferred mushroom ketchup. The sauces would
(02:59):
be allowed to sit for a few days to a
few weeks to ferment, and would then be strained and bottled. Meanwhile, tomatoes,
which are native to the Americas, were becoming part of
European and colonial cuisines. The first known recipe for tomato
ketchup was published in eighteen twelve by a Philadelphia doctor
and horticulturist by the name of James Nice. He called
(03:22):
tomatoes love apples, based on the French term for the
produce of palms d'ye moor. Tomatoes and their etymology whole
different episode anyway, tomatoes and ketchup made from them became
something of a health craze in the US over the
next few decades, and some companies tried to commercialize tomato ketchup.
But we didn't have really reliable sterilization or canning technology yet,
(03:47):
so those products and their preservatives weren't actually very good
for you. Enter Henry J. Hines. Hines was a businessman
out of Pittsburgh who had gotten his start bottling and
selling horseradish around the early eighteen seventies. He teamed up
with one doctor, Harvey Washington Wilie, who helped him create
(04:08):
clean manufacturing processes and quality control, and hired a food
scientist to tweak his recipes. Together, they came up with
a ketchup made from ripe red tomatoes with spices and
a lot of salt, vinegar, and sugar as preservatives. By
the eighteen nineties, Hines had a big condiment business going,
(04:29):
with at least fifty seven varieties of products, though that
exact number was probably just a random marketing thing. Hines
was a progressive boss. In the late eighteen hundreds, he
was giving his factory employees free access to medical and
dental care on site emergency care and life and death insurance.
(04:50):
The company provided uniforms, laundry service, washrooms, and on site
manicures to make sure employees came to the line clean.
The Pittsburgh had a swimming pool, jim and rooftop garden
like I sort of want to go bottle ketchup. In
the late eighteen hundreds in Pennsylvania, Hines was also marketing
(05:11):
this modern manufacturing process. He opened his factories to public tours.
He sold his products in clear glass bottles. He hired
traveling salesmen to display Hines products in local grocery stores
and espouse the quality of these foods. They were expensive,
but more pure and amidst all of this, doctor Wilie,
(05:33):
who by the turn of the century was the chief
chemist at the Federal Bureau of Chemistry, was on a
campaign to bring pure foods to the people by regulating
the increasingly industrial food supply. At that point, we didn't
have national consumer protection laws in place concerning food or drugs.
(05:53):
Producers didn't have to follow sanitation procedures, or label things
accurately or list their ingredients. There was growing public concern
about manufactured foods being adulterated or contaminated, and doctor Wilie
went on speaking tours railing against big business cost cutters
as the hosts of Satan and promoting a pure Food
(06:15):
Act as necessary for the survival of the human race.
This is ostensibly an episode about ketchup. Hines was a
big supporter of a pure Food Act. Of course, they
were already a corporate leader in sanitary manufacturing conditions. They
were ahead of the game there, but they also wanted
to help inspire greater public confidence in commercially prepared foods.
(06:39):
These issues had been simmering for decades, but then Upton
Sinclair's The Jungle came out in February of nineteen oh six,
revealing highly unsafe and unsanitary conditions in the meat packing industry.
It caused an uproar, and the Pure Food and Drug
Act passed in June that year. It proper labeling of
(07:01):
ingredients on packaging and paved the way for the Food
and Drug Administration to be created. Heine's business and their
Ketchup boomed by nineteen oh eight that sold two point
five million dollars worth of tomato based ketchup as it
became more popular alternate ingredient ketchups and home recipes faded
(07:21):
away in the US, though you can still find them
in other places. For example, the Philippines favors banana based ketchup.
But okay, we have to talk about the science of
ketchup and specifically how it flows or sometimes fails to flow.
A lot of technology over the years has gone into
(07:41):
getting ketchup out of its containers and onto your food.
This roots from the fact that ketchup is what's called
a non Newtonian fluid. Let's unpack that a Newtonian fluid
is one that has a viscosity, that is, a thickness
or resistance to flow related only to its temperature. Water
(08:04):
and oil are Newtonian fluids because pressure and agitation don't
affect the rate at which they flow, which is to
say that no matter how hard you shake water, it
always flows the same way. Viscosity is different than density.
Think of pouring honey versus cream into a cup of tea.
(08:25):
Honey is more viscous and more dense than water. It
takes longer to pour and it's heavier. You put it
in tea and it'll sink. Cream is more viscous but
less dense. It takes longer to pour than water, but
it floats in tea or at least mixes in anyway.
Unlike water and other Newtonian fluids, non Newtonian fluids are
(08:50):
affected by pressure and agitation. Think about quicksand we all
thought about quicksand right, it's about twice as dense as
you are, meaning that you can float on it, but
only if you don't struggle. If you struggle in quicksand
you agitate it and thus make it less viscous, and
you'll sink. That's why you should stay calm and move
(09:13):
slowly if you ever get trapped in quicksand or in toothpaste,
or in ketchup. More practically, though, you can put this
to use when you're trying to get ketchup out of
a glass bottle. It's so viscous that it gets jammed
up at the bottle's neck a butt. By applying agitation,
that is, sheer stress to the ketchup in the neck,
(09:35):
you can make it less viscous and it'll flow faster.
If you've got a bottle of Hinds, you do that
by tapping the neck of the bottle right on the
fifty seven label. For any other brand. It's right around
halfway up the neck. The reason that tapping the bottom
of the bottle doesn't work is because that only affects
the viscosity of the ketchup at the bottom, and that's
(09:57):
not where the problem is. Plastic squeeze bottles for Ketchup
were unveiled in nineteen eighty three, but tended to overshoot
the problem. The upside down squeeze bottles that debuted in
two thousand and two from both Hinds and Hunts, its
main us competitor, incorporate a clever silicone valve in the
lid to fix this problem. The valve has slits arranged
(10:21):
at right angles to each other, so they part when
you apply pressure via a squeeze to the bottle, and
then seal back up neatly when relaxed. The caps also
feature grooves that capture watery Ketchup juice and prevent it
from squirting out. Instead, it gets mixed back into the
body of the ketchup. However, it's packaged. Americans do devour
(10:45):
tomato Ketchup, but where not it's number one fans per capita,
Finland and Canada seem to be competing for who can
consume the most. Today's episode is based on the article
how Ketchup Works on how stuffworks dot Com written by
Melanie Redzeegy McManus, and on an episode of my other
(11:08):
podcast Saver called The Saucy History of Ketchup. Brain Stuff
is a production of iHeartRadio in partnership with how Stuffworks
dot Com and is produced by Tyler klang A. Four
more podcasts from my heart Radio. Visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
BrainStuff News
Host
Lauren Vogelbaum
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