Ketchup: The Transnational Creation of a Global Condiment, c. 1700–1920

The history of ketchup began in rural and port-areas of Vietnam and China, with British explorers, and, via the history of the tomato, with Italian explorers and agents of the Spanish Empire. By the 1800s, French migrants, global trade, and translated cookbooks equipped central European household workers with the tools to make a long-shelf-life sauce in bottles in the Atlantic space of mobile populations between Europe, the United States, and Canada. Building on global histories of trade, migration, and translation, on transnational approaches to food studies, and on the examination of so-called objects of lower aesthetic value, this article combines structural explanations of food change (empire, political power, medical authority, migration) with subaltern innovation (household experimentation, consumption) to explore the centralization of food trends in central Europe and expound this understudied region’s high impact across the globe in the modern era.