Hello jonjax:
No, the question is not dumb and i was glad to research it as i know the answer but in a tidbit sorta way. I really love understanding how words come about and their history etc. Here is the answer:
[Q]
From Suzanne: “Why is
ketchup also called
catsup?”
[A]
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”. [
Caveer is caviar;
botargo is a fish-based relish made of the roe of the mullet or tunny.] 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.
Simple question: complicated answer!
source: world wide words