06/12/2026
Before tomato ketchup existed, the ketchup on George Washington's table was made from mushrooms.
The word ketchup has nothing to do with tomatoes. It traces back to the Chinese ke-tsiap, a pickled fish sauce, and for most of culinary history the term referred to any number of fermented or concentrated condiments made from mushrooms, walnuts, oysters or anchovies. The tomato version did not become standard until the mid-19th century, and for a very good reason: most people in England and colonial America still believed tomatoes were poisonous well into the 1700s. The tomato is in the nightshade family and the suspicion was not entirely irrational. People simply were not eating them.
What they were eating instead was this. Mushrooms salted overnight until they give up an extraordinary dark, intensely flavoured liquid. Strained, spiced with nutmeg and warm spices, and reduced until thick and concentrated. The result is not ketchup in any sense you would recognise from a burger joint. It is a dark, almost black liquid that tastes like the most concentrated mushroom stock you have ever encountered. A teaspoon in a gravy. A splash in a braise. The same umami depth that Worcestershire sauce provides but with a cleaner, more directly mushroom-forward character. And not coincidentally, Worcestershire sauce developed in the 1830s is a direct descendant of exactly this tradition.
The recipe I used comes from Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy, published in 1747 and the most important cookbook in colonial American history. George Washington owned a copy. Thomas Jefferson owned a copy. Food historians confirm that mushroom ketchup was a documented pantry staple in Founding Father households, and Martha Washington's own recipe book documents related fermented condiment preparations.
This was the ketchup of the people who built the country. I rated it 7.4 out of 10 and the most accurate modern comparison is a homemade Worcestershire sauce with a cleaner finish. Full history and the complete Hannah Glasse recipe on the blog now:
https://eatshistory.com/mushroom-ketchup-recipe-the-condiment-that-came-before-tomato-ketchup/
