Here’s a fun ketchup fact!

Across southeast Asia, soy sauce is called various words that sound similar to ketchup, such as kecap (pronounced kay-jaap). So there’s this theory that Europeans visited Indonesia and tried some soy sauce, and loved it. Then they went home and tried to make their own, but they didn’t have any soy beans, so they used tomatoes. And thus, European ketchup. Now I’m Australian, and over here we call it tomato sauce. And I maintain that ketchup isn’t authentic without soy beans. My favourite ketchup is Indonesian kecap manis, or sweet ketchup.