FOOD NEWS
The Bright Green Cucumber Sauce That Precedes Tomato Ketchup
By Elias Nash
Today, when we think of ketchup, it's defined by the presence of tomato. However, before tomato ketchup took over America, cucumber ketchup was actually a thing.
In the late 1700s and early 1800s, home cooks would make ketchup variations from whatever they had, including oysters, mushrooms, plums, peaches, berries, celery, or cucumbers.
Many historic British and American cookbooks contain recipes for cucumber ketchup, but they vary greatly from one to the next.
The ingredients for cucumber ketchup are a free-for-all, with recipes calling for everything from mustard seed to nutmeg to horseradish to round out the flavor.
In a basic recipe, you would boil chopped or grated cucumbers with onions, vinegar, and various spices before lowering the heat and simmering to produce a viscous sauce.
When homemade ketchup was the standard, people were more flexible with ingredients, but in 1876, the up-and-coming H.J. Heinz Company released its famous tomato ketchup.
After Henry Heinz patented the famous bottle in 1882, the convenience of store-bought ketchup proved irresistible and pushed out the other ingredients once used to make ketchup.