General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Who Puts Catsup On A Steak?... [View all]Igel
(35,309 posts)There's no arguing over tastes.
Older than the Heinz-variety catsup is Hunts. A lot of people use A-1. They're similar but different. Both are basically unreformed catsup--they include tomatoes and something sour as well as fish.
But catsup used to routinely have anchovies in it. Used to have mushrooms in it, at least in some kinds.
Worcestershire sauce is true to even older varieties of ketchup. The recipe kept morphing, easier when it was home-made or home-brewed than when it became the object of large corporations, patents, trademarks, and media campaigns.
It all started off as fermented rice & fish sauce. I have Vietnamese fish sauce in my pantry, next to the Hunts, A-1, Worcestershire sauce, and even the stuff much, much closer to the original S. Chinese stuff, Vietnamese fish sauce.
The word's apparently traceable back to a Hokkien word. That's a variety of Chinese that's been under extreme pressure from Mandarin over the last 400 years. It's not extinct, far from it, but it's probably got a limited life-span given the imperialism and push for assimilation that is PC in some countries.