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Sarah Lohman: Eight Flavors (2016, Simon & Schuster) 4 stars

“Very cool…a breezy American culinary history that you didn’t know you wanted” (Bon Appetit …

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, recipes for making soy sauce at home appeared in English and American cookbooks. Since soybeans were not widely available, these recipes used local ingredients such as mushrooms, walnuts, and fish...

Tomato was another popular ingredient for making American "soy" sauce... The names for these varying sauces were "ketchups," or "catch-ups," or "catsups," derived from the Indonesian word for soy sauce: ketjap.

Eight Flavors by  (Page 124)

ketchup is soy sauce????????????????

@technomancy @mouse Lots of fermentations are controlled (well, *selected*, really) by salt, so it would make sense that many of these savory sauces would be salty.

I wonder if the heavy use of sugar in kecap manis plays a similar role as salt by lowering the water activity (in the same way that jams are moderately shelf stable).

Does it have much sourness to it? I'm wondering if there's much in the way of lactic acid production.