Ketchup vs. Catsup, A Changing Sauce with Changing Names

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Wayne Oliver from LaCrescent, Minnesota.

And I I was just wondering about the word cat soup, how it evolved into ketchup, and how that all came about was I was listening to a old time radio show from nineteen fifty, Rocky Jordan, where Del Monte was the sponsor of the show and I had to listen to it three times, but they clearly said cat soup.

And all the years I just thought cat C A T S U P was pronounced ketchup too.

I never knew the difference.

And was just wondering maybe you had some ideas.

All right.

So let’s clarify this for a second.

So you’re hearing that last syllable for this tomato-e red condiment.

You’re hearing it pronounced like S O U P.

Absolutely.

That’s exact I mean I replayed that announcer on the Rocky Jordan episode at least three times.

So just to be clear, Larry Thor, I listened to old time radio too.

Larry Thor was the announcer for the Rocky Jordan show for a couple of years, when Del Monte was the sponsor.

And he used the word C A T S U P a lot.

And I didn’t I never heard him say soup.

It was always SUP SUP.

I’d be happy to send you the episode.

Oh yes, please, because it would mean so what it would mean probably, Martha, correct me if I’m wrong, that he probably just misspoke because he usually says SUP SUP.

Yeah, I wonder if he misspoke or was making a joke or something.

I mean there were commercials on television by the Del Monte people where they talked about cats up.

I remember being really smart by that back in the That vowel is a schwa sound, right?

Not a long ooh sound.

Catsup.

Yeah.

Back in the seventies and eighties.

In fact you can find these commercials online.

But yeah, Del Mani switched after a while.

And the whole story is pretty interesting, Wayne.

Because you may know that that the history of catchup goes back, gosh, at least five hundred years to China and the fact that Chinese seafarers encountered this fermented fish sauce when they visited places like Vietnam and can what’s now Vietnam and Cambodia and they called it something like ketchup or something like that that meant fish brine.

And then when British and Dutch traders came across this stuff and brought it back to Europe in the seventeenth century.

People couldn’t quite agree how to spell the name of this fish sauce in their own languages.

And in English it was spelled ketch-up, K-E-T-C-H-U-P, and catch up, like you’re catching up with somebody, and Catsup, C-A-T-S-U-P, and a couple of other ways, and none of those was really correct, so to speak, because it was an anglicized version of a Chinese dialect term.

Any idea how it went from a fish sauce to tomato?

Well that’s very interesting because originally when it was distributed in europe it was more like a soy or a Worcestershire sauce and then over time the recipe went through all these changes and particularly in the eighteenth century, people started adding tomatoes and and by the nineteenth century sometimes this stuff was called tomato soy, which is really interesting.

And then well into the 1800s, Catsup, C A T S U P, was actually the dominant American spelling.

And there was a Pittsburgh entrepreneur named Mr. Heinz, who in 1876 launched a new product that he called Heinz Tomato Catsup.

And what happened was that Mr. Heinz deliberately switched to Ketchup, K-E-T-C-H-U-P, to stand out from his competitors.

And over time, Heinz began to dominate the market and ketchup became the national standard and Del Monte actually held on to ketchup until nineteen eighty eight and then just gave up and started calling it ketchup.

It finally caught up.

Yeah, marketing of its finest.

But do send us the audio of Larry Thor saying it is soup.

I think he probably misspoke because all the ones I’ve heard on the Rocky Jordan show, which by the way, everyone is this kind of action-packed program about a hard boiled detective in Cairo.

Just really kind of wild stuff.

But most of the time I think Larry Thor says SOP instead of soup.

Yeah.

Well I will I will be happy to send that to you, Grant.

I really appreciate you taking the time to get involved and answer the question for me.

All right, take care, Wayne.

Appreciate the call.

Thank you.

Thank you both very much.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We will link to that Rocky Jordan episode when Wayne sends it to us on the website.

You can also find tons of Rocky Jordan episodes on archive.org, Internet Archive.

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