Tomato ketchup: the condiment without which most of us can not eat our fries, was once used as a medicine. Ketchup didn't have tomatoes in it till the 1830s. Yeah, it was basically just fish or mushroom sauce, depending on where you had it. The oldest recipes of ketchup include pickling intestines of fishes. So as you can imagine that, ketchup in the 18th and 19th centuries was not as tasty as we know it.
In Europe and America, people thought that tomatoes were decorative plants that were poisonous and not fit for human consumption. It took about a century for people to realize that tomato wasn't toxic but was good for us because it contained antioxidants. For people to understand this, a man named Robert Gibbon Johnson consumed an entire box of tomatoes.
In 1834, Dr. John Cooke Bennet added tomatoes to the fish ketchup. He claimed that his recipe could cure Diarrhea, Indigestion, Jaundice, and Rheumatism. Soon, many people started selling their own tomato-based pills, but many of these were laxatives. Due to false claims, the ketchup medicine empire collapsed in 1850.
After the 1850s, many tried new recipes, and since it could no longer be a medicine, people thought small servings could improve their immunities. The manufactures used coal tar in ketchup, so Heinz tried making ketchup as pure as possible. And they soon ended up with the recipe that we still use in ketchup.
Interesting
Strange!