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By Luis Gustavo. See how we research and review our content.
The word “ketchup” first shows up in English in 1682, and the first known recipe that used tomatoes did not appear until 1812. Many of the most familiar items on a dinner table have a past that looks nothing like their present.
These five stories cover a condiment with a health-food phase, a sandwich with a disputed backstory, a pizza whose royal legend is hard to document, a bean that paid for turkeys, and a utensil that took centuries to catch on. Each comes with a note on what the sources do and do not support.
1. Ketchup was once sold as medicine
The story is really about tomatoes. In the 1830s, Dr. John Cook Bennett, an Ohio physician, promoted tomatoes as a remedy for indigestion, diarrhea and bilious attacks, and tomato “pills” sold as pure extract soon appeared in pharmacies and grocery stores. Popular retellings often fold ketchup into that story, but the better-documented product is the pill, not the bottled sauce.
The craze did not last. Later investigations found that some of the pills contained no tomato at all, and physicians were still debating tomatoes’ medical value at an American Medical Association meeting in 1869. Meanwhile, ordinary ketchup was heading for the kitchen: H. J. Heinz added catsup to his product line in 1876. Nothing here suggests that any food sauce was ever a proven treatment, and anyone with digestive problems should talk to a doctor rather than a condiment shelf.
2. The sandwich got its name because of a card game
The namesake is John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, an eighteenth-century English aristocrat. The card-table version, in which he asked for beef between bread so he could keep playing without greasy fingers, comes from a French traveller, Pierre-Jean Grosley, who spent a year in London in 1765 and published his account in 1770. It is a rumour about a third party, not a firsthand record.
The Earl’s biographer, N. A. M. Rodger, offers a plainer explanation: with a naval career, a political career and an interest in the arts, he more likely ate at his desk. The food itself is much older than the name. English plays of the 1500s and 1600s mention “bread and meat” and “bread and cheese”, and John Ray described Dutch taverns serving thin slices of beef on buttered bread in 1673.
3. Margherita pizza has a “patriotic” origin story
According to the legend, the royal palace of Capodimonte asked the Neapolitan pizza maker Raffaele Esposito in 1889 to cook for Queen Margherita, and she liked the pie in the colours of the Italian flag best: red tomato, white mozzarella, green basil. A letter of thanks is said to hang in the shop that is now Pizzeria Brandi.
Historians have been less convinced. Later research questioned the letter’s authenticity, found no newspaper coverage of the visit from the time, and traced the story and the name to promotion in the 1930s and 1940s. Similar toppings were already in use in Naples between 1796 and 1810, and Emanuele Rocco recorded basil, tomato and thin mozzarella slices on pizza in 1849. The combination predates the queen even if the name does not.
4. Chocolate was once used as currency
Across Aztec markets, cacao beans served as currency. Accounts differ on exact prices, but sources cite figures such as one bean for a tomato, 30 for a rabbit and 100 to 200 for a turkey. Beans were also a common demand as tribute from subject peoples.
Anything this valuable invited fraud: counterfeiters hollowed out beans and filled them with sand or similar substitutes. The drink made from cacao was a luxury of the upper classes, usually served in decorated cups that may have signalled status. It was usually taken after meals, often with tobacco, while poorer people may have stirred it into maize gruel on special occasions such as weddings.
5. The fork took centuries to be accepted in Europe
The personal table fork probably originated in the Byzantine Empire. A well-known account has the Byzantine princess Maria Argyropoulina bringing golden forks to Venice around 1004, when she married the son of Doge Pietro II Orseolo, and the theologian Peter Damian condemned them as vanity. Pasta helped the fork spread through Italy, where noodles suit tines, and it was nearly universal among merchants and the upper classes there by 1600.
Northern Europe was slower. The traveller Thomas Coryat described forks in English in 1611, but they were long dismissed as an unmanly Italian affectation. They only became common in Britain in the 1700s, arrived in North America around the time of the American Revolution, and took their modern four-tine shape in the early 1800s.
Where the Word Ketchup Comes From
The origin of the name is still debated. One theory traces it to a Hokkien word for the brine of pickled fish or shellfish, recorded in an 1873 Amoy dictionary; another points to the Malay word kicap, which originally meant soy sauce. Either way, early English ketchups were savoury, tomato-free sauces, and in the 1600s the main ingredient in British recipes was mushrooms.
The first known tomato ketchup recipe was published by James Mease in 1812, and in 1837 Jonas Yerkes is credited as the first American to sell it in bottles nationwide. Spoilage was the stumbling block until 1909, when Katherine Bitting’s research showed that more sugar and vinegar could keep it from going off without chemical preservatives.
Speaking of drinks at the table: wine and coffee hide just as many scientific and historical surprises as these, straight from the bottle and the cup. For more kitchen-table history, see inventions created completely by accident and fashion history facts that sound crazy today.
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Between a sandwich blamed on a gambler and a pizza blamed on a queen, the next food legend you hear is worth checking against its earliest written source.