I was reading an article about the old Roman garum sauce and how it used to be wide-spread throughout the empire but is almost unknown today. When they were describing it, I thought, wait a second... isn't that just fermented fish sauce which is ubiquitous in asian cooking? (it is)
Then I saw, casually hanging out on the side of that article that that most American of sauces, ketchup, has, as its ancestor, the same fish sauce! That sweet tomato-based (as new world as it gets insofar as condiments get!) gets its name from a Hokkien Chinese word, kê-tsiap! A quick internet search makes me feel like the last person on Earth to find this out.
Reminds my of how I was a teenager before I realized that the delicate french condiment mayonaisse that my grandmother would whip up from scratch just before the meal in France was supposed to be the same thing as what I knew as "mahnaze" in a jar from the store in Alabama.
Oh, now I'm thinking on one of my favorite scenes from the great Pulp Fiction:
I've got to try dipping my next batch of french fries in fish sauce, right?
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