It's basically the red in red, white, and blue, right?

And that red, clearly is from the tomatoes the ketchup is made from.

Yum!

But that wasn't always the case.

The first recorded recipe for ketchup comes from China.

And for more than a thousand years, it wasn't even made with tomatoes.

It was made with fish guts.

Eww!

Fish intestine, bladder, and stomach all mixed together with salt, then sealed and heated in the hot summer sun for 20 days.

That was the original ketchup, a fermented fish paste that dates back to 6th century China.

It was popular throughout Southeast Asia, and British and Dutch settlers who arrived in the 1600s loved the stuff.

Over time, they brought ketchup home to Europe and added their own modifications including beer, mushrooms, walnuts, oysters, strawberries, and peaches.

By the mid-1700s, English ketchup was a mainstay on British dinner tables;

and as colonists went west, it soon made its way across the pond.

That's where tomatoes come in.

They're native to the Americas.

And it's rumored Europeans once believed they were poisonous, but poisonous they were not.

In 1812, a Philadelphia horticulturalist and scientist by the name of James Mease introduced tomatoes into the mix.

He published a tomato ketchup recipe that was the beginning of a new crimson era.

From there, many different iterations were concocted.

And by the end of the 18th century, the New York Tribune called tomato ketchup"America's national condiment that was on every table in the land."

Which brings us back to this.

Tomato ketchup is here to stay.

And I, for one, don't miss the fish guts.