The Chinese Invented this too...?

I had breakfast at a popular little restaurant on the beach and with limited seating, I decided to sit at the counter. There are just two spots at this counter and a man sat in one of the seats. He read his book while waiting for his breakfast.

His breakfast arrives and he asks me to pass the "catsup". Haven't heard that word in a while! Got me to thinking about 'catsup' vs 'ketchup' and decided I'd have to look it up.

Here's what I found on Wikipedia:

In the 1690s the Chinese mixed together a concoction of pickled fish and spices and called it kôe-chiap or kê-chiap (鮭汁) meaning the brine of pickled fish (鮭, carp; 汁, juice) or shellfish.^[2]
By the early 18th century, the table sauce had made it to the Malay states (present day Malaysia and Singapore), where it was discovered by British explorers, and by 1740, it had become a British staple.^{[citation needed]} The Malay word for the sauce was kĕchap. That word evolved into the English word "ketchup".

While we're on the topic of ketchup, the Heinz label sported a tiny little pickle under its name...until recently that is. As a graphic designer, I'm always looking at packaging and labels and so I wondered what the little pickle was about. I was fairly sure that ketchup was their namesake and that it should be a little tomato if anything on there. I wrote Heinz Canada an email inquiring about this and sadly, I received a corporate email that not only didn't answer the question, it said surprisingly little, despite its length.

After that, Heinz did put a nice little illustration of a tomato on their label (I'm not insinuating I had anything to do with this either!). Now if only they could train people to keep the squeeze bottle standing on its cap, as it was designed to be used...

Food for thought!