Ketchup

Pulp Fiction fans will remember this one:

"Three tomatoes are walking down the street- a poppa tomato, a momma tomato, and a little baby tomato. Baby tomato starts lagging behind. Poppa tomato gets angry, goes over to the baby tomato, and smooshes him... and says, Catch up."

But ketchup wasn't always made from tomatoes, which leads me to this article from Gourmet...

Like apple pie and the hamburger, tomato ketchup is woven into the thread of the American culinary experience.

Historians John and Karen Hess write in Taste of America that “until the second half of the nineteenth century, ketchup usually meant a pickle of mushrooms, oysters, or walnuts.”

According to the book Pure Ketchup, by Andrew F. Smith, as the 19th century came to a close tomato ketchup was reported by the National Herald Tribune and the Scientific American Supplement to be America’s national condiment, even though Americans still had a number of tomato-free commercial ketchup options that included celery, curry, cucumber, and even oyster. These choices thinned during the 20th century, but still appeared sporadically in food media; throughout the 1940s and ‘50s, and into the ‘60s, Gourmet featured recipes for cranberry, currant, mushroom, grape, walnut, and apple ketchups. Some of these ketchups still hold small audiences in other countries, and recipes for ketchup varieties beyond tomato still pop up every so often in magazines, online, and on menus.