How old is tomato sauce?

Sauces are a key ingredient, and countless cookbooks encourage adding tomato sauce to stews, vegetables, and even desserts.

If the intense tomato flavor of these ketchups seems odd, that's because this ketchup isn't the ubiquitous red stain you might imagine. In fact, there aren't even any tomatoes in this sweet and salty brown sauce. So where did this early tomato sauce come from? How did it become the sauce we know and love today? To answer these questions, we have to turn to ketchup's delicious cousin: fish sauce.

As early as 300 B.C. Chinese fishermen routinely caught batches of small fish that were too numerous to eat at once, but too time-consuming to store individually.

Typically, the day's catch is salted and stored together.

After a few months, the enzymes in the fish will break down the protein in the body and then ferment it. The result is a rich, salty liquid that is filtered and stored as fish sauce. Chinese fishermen weren't the only ones to invent this delicious condiment.

The ancient Greeks and Romans, who later conquered them, built their entire cuisine around the intense umami flavor of fish sauce.

This sauce, which they called "garum", accompanied every soldier to the front lines of the empire.

They built dozens of fish sauce factories all over the Mediterranean, each capable of producing thousands of liters of fish sauce. But when the Roman Empire collapsed, so did their spice business.

Most Europeans cooked without fish sauce for a thousand years until the Dutch East India Company arrived in Southeast Asia in the early 17th century. Dutch and English have used countless products in the region, including the most common local spice. This well-known liquid has many words, including "KE-TSIAP" and "Koe-Cheup".

However, after arriving at the British port, its name was thickened in tomato sauce, which began the highest fish sauce wave in Europe. European ships delivered ketchup throughout the Western Hemisphere until they were driven out by Asian trading centers in the mid-18th century. But Volkswagen refuses to let ketchup be used as ketchup.

Tomato sauce recipes appeared in dozens of British cookbooks, including everything from oysters and anchovies to mushrooms and walnuts.

Soon, ketchup became a common term for all brown sauces.

This great ketchup hunt turned up some of England's most enduring condiments, including Worcestershire sauce, A1 sauce and HP sauce.

But a chef from across the Atlantic has brought a new color to the equation. Although the popularity of tomatoes varies across Europe, American chefs incorporate this New World fruit into a variety of dishes.

In 1812, Philadelphia physician and food enthusiast James Meese introduced the first ketchup, a thin, watery mixture of tomato pulp, spices, raw onions, and brandy.

It is not accessible from the fish sauce, but the glutamic acid content in the tomatoes is very high and the glutamate content is high.

In the second half of the 19th century, bottled foods became common, and several new bottling companies began to use ketchup.

In the 1870s, instead of shallots and brandy, most ketchups had added sugar, salt and sodium benzoate, a questionable preservative found in most bottled products. But the most important changes to this recipe were yet to come.

After a slow start selling pickles, Henry J.Heinz started selling a variety of popular ketchups. By the turn of the 20th century, he was keen to use healthier, natural ingredients This prompted Heinz to replace the sodium benzoate with riper tomatoes and lots of vinegar.

The resulting thick, gooey formula became an instant bestseller even though it was much harder to get out of the bottle.

Throughout the 20th century, this savory red sauce covered the globe, pairing with America's Food Ambassadors.

Today, 90 percent of American homes have ketchup in their kitchens, and Heinz's recipe has even been the basis for dozens of other sauces and condiments that are descendants of the same fish family.