Ketchup started as fermented fish sauce, mayonnaise's name has never been proven, and neither is really about flavor

The most American condiment on earth started as Chinese fish sauce

Ketchup’s name comes from Hokkien Chinese kê-tsiap — a fermented-fish sauce, likely traced further back to Vietnamese and Khmer fish sauce along the Mekong. British sailors encountered it trading in Southeast Asia, brought the idea home, and spent roughly a century trying to reproduce the flavor without the original ingredients — early British recipes used mushrooms, walnuts, oysters, or anchovies; mushroom ketchup predates tomato ketchup by decades. The first published tomato ketchup recipe appeared in the US in 1812. Heinz, from 1876, won the category commercially by using fully ripe tomatoes — naturally high in the preservative pectin — and heavy vinegar to cut spoilage risk, at a time when adulterated, unsafe ketchup was a real public health problem.

Ketchup, in other words, isn’t really a tomato condiment that happened to get a fish-sauce name. It’s a 300-year-old preservation technology, several ingredient substitutions deep, that eventually settled on tomato as the cheapest, safest, most consistent base available.

Mayonnaise’s origin has genuinely never been settled

The popular story: the Duke of Richelieu’s chef improvised the sauce during the 1756 siege of Mahón, Menorca, and named it “mahonnaise.” It’s a great story, and it’s not actually proven — the name isn’t attested in any written source until decades after the supposed event. Menorcans insist an aioli-adjacent sauce predates the French occupation entirely, calling it salsa mahonesa as a native Catalan invention. A rival theory derives the name from Bayonne instead of Mahón. Nobody has resolved this, and the sauce’s actual invention — a stable emulsion of oil and egg yolk — is a genuine piece of kitchen chemistry regardless of who gets credit for it.

French “mother sauces” — the origin of standardized recipe technique itself

This is the sauce history that connects directly back to how professional kitchens are organized at all. Carême codified four grandes sauces in 1833: béchamel, velouté, espagnole, allemande. Escoffier, in his 1903 Guide Culinaire, replaced allemande with hollandaise and tomate — the same codification project as his brigade station system, just applied to sauce technique instead of kitchen staffing. The entire point of a “mother sauce” system is that a handful of standardized base preparations can be varied into hundreds of derivative sauces, so a kitchen’s technique stays consistent across dishes, across cooks, and across time — without every dish needing its own from-scratch invention.

That’s not a coincidence with how modern recipe costing works. A mother sauce is, functionally, a sub-recipe: a standardized, reusable base component that gets costed once and then applied across every dish that uses it.

Umami and sriracha — chemistry and refugee improvisation, decades apart

Two more sauce stories worth knowing. Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda tasted something in kombu dashi broth in 1907 that wasn’t sweet, salty, sour, or bitter, isolated glutamate crystals by 1908, named the taste umami, and co-founded Ajinomoto in 1909 to sell monosodium glutamate as the world’s first synthesized flavor-enhancer — proof that “adding a sauce” is sometimes literally applied chemistry, not folklore.

And sriracha: David Tran, an ethnic-Chinese former South Vietnamese army officer, fled Saigon by boat in December 1978 during Vietnam’s expulsion of its ethnic-Chinese population, smuggling gold hidden inside condensed-milk cans. He reached Los Angeles within weeks and founded Huy Fong Foods within a month of arrival, naming the company after the freighter that carried him out. He didn’t spend money on marketing — the sauce spread on its own.

Why sauces exist at all — four reasons, not one

Every sauce in this piece, and in this whole series, reduces to one of the same four underlying reasons:

1. Masking and preserving — before refrigeration, salt, vinegar, and fermentation disguised or delayed spoilage. Ketchup, Tabasco, and fish sauce are all, at root, this.
2. Stretching expensive ingredients — a small amount of concentrated flavor makes a bland or cheap base palatable and consistent.
3. Status and technique display — French mother sauces exist partly to demonstrate skill, well beyond any nutritional or preservation necessity.
4. Taste science — umami’s discovery shows sauces aren’t just tradition dressed up as flavor; they’re chemistry humans identified and exploited long before they could explain why it worked.

What this actually means for a modern kitchen

A sauce, in every one of these stories, is doing real operational work — masking a supply-chain problem, standardizing technique across staff, stretching a budget, or scientifically boosting flavor at minimal cost. None of that has changed. What has changed is that a modern kitchen can actually measure which of those four jobs a given sauce is doing for a specific dish, and what it costs to do it — instead of treating “add sauce” as a fixed, unexamined step in a recipe.

Three questions worth asking about the sauces already on your menu:

1. Is this sauce actually doing one of those four jobs, or is it there out of habit because it’s always been there?
2. Do you know what it costs per portion, the same way you’d know for any other recipe component?
3. Could you standardize it once, as a sub-recipe, the way Carême and Escoffier standardized mother sauces — instead of every cook making a slightly different version?

How CalcMenu treats sauces as what they actually are: recipes

A mother sauce is a sub-recipe. A signature sauce on your menu is a recipe with its own cost, yield, and margin impact — whether or not anyone’s ever costed it that way.

• Sub-recipe costing — cost a base sauce once, then let every dish that uses it inherit an accurate, up-to-date cost automatically, the same logic Escoffier’s mother-sauce system was built on.
• Standardized technique across every cook and every site — the same reason mother sauces existed in the first place: consistency without reinventing the base from scratch every time.
• Real cost visibility on the “small” recipe components — so a sauce nobody’s re-costed since the menu launched doesn’t quietly become a margin problem.

CalcMenu doesn’t care whether your sauce started as fermented fish, a disputed 1756 legend, or a codified 1903 classification. It makes sure you actually know what it costs, every time it goes on a plate.

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Sources

• Ketchup’s Chinese origins – Slate
• The History of Mayonnaise: Why the Menorca Origin Story Doesn’t Add Up – Keplite
• French mother sauces – Wikipedia
• Kikunae Ikeda – Wikipedia
• How Vietnamese Refugee David Tran Became America’s First Hot Sauce Billionaire – Forbes