Say "ketchup" today and everyone pictures a red tomato sauce. Yet ketchup's beginnings had nothing to do with tomatoes at all. In the Fujian region of southern China there was a fermented brine made by salting fish, known in the local dialect as kê-tsiap — much like the liquid from Korean salted seafood. This condiment spread along the Southeast Asian trade routes to the Malay Peninsula, and in the 17th century British merchants brought the taste home. In Britain, people made a similar sauce using mushrooms or walnuts instead of fish, calling it catchup or ketchup. Tomatoes did not enter the picture until the 19th century, in America.