Ketchup is the condiment that was once sold as medicine. In the 1830s, tomato-based pills and extracts were marketed across the United States as cures for everything from indigestion to cholera. The story of how tomatoes went from suspected poison to miracle cure to America’s favorite sauce is one of the stranger chapters in food history.
Why Americans Feared Tomatoes
Before the 1830s, many Americans viewed tomatoes with deep suspicion. The fruit belongs to the nightshade family, and its resemblance to known toxic plants earned it the nickname “poison apple.” While tomatoes were already a dietary staple in parts of Europe and Central America, much of the American public avoided them entirely.
That changed largely because of one physician: Dr. John Cook Bennett. Bennett began aggressively promoting the tomato as a powerful health food with near-miraculous medicinal properties. His claims caught fire, and within a few years, tomatoes had flipped from feared fruit to the basis of a booming patent medicine industry.
The Tomato Pill Craze of the 1830s
Salesmen in the 1830s and 1840s promised that concentrated tomato pills could cure headaches, diarrhea, and even cholera. The most prominent figure in this market was Archibald Miles, a Cleveland-based merchant who claimed his “Extract of Tomato” pills had been scientifically tested and painstakingly developed over years. Miles marketed them as treatments for conditions ranging from indigestion to syphilis, and he built a distribution network of agents and retailers stretching from the Gulf Coast to the Canadian border.
Miles wasn’t alone. Dozens of competitors jumped into the tomato pill business, each making bolder health claims than the last. For roughly a decade, tomato extract was one of the hottest products in American medicine.
How the Bubble Burst
The tomato pill market collapsed in the late 1840s for a few damning reasons. Later analyses revealed that some of the most popular tomato pills contained no tomato extract at all. It also came to light that Dr. Bennett’s own medical credentials came from what many considered a diploma mill. As the cure-all claims failed to hold up under any real scrutiny, public enthusiasm dried up. The tomato pill went from pharmacy staple to cautionary tale in less than a decade.
From Medicine Cabinet to Dinner Table
The pill craze faded, but it left behind something lasting: Americans had lost their fear of tomatoes. By 1865, tomatoes had become one of the country’s favorite vegetables, and their popularity coincided with innovations in commercial bottling. In the late 19th century, glass-makers introduced inexpensive, mold-formed flasks that made it far easier to transport and store sauces. Food companies could suddenly bring bottled products to market at scale.
Henry J. Heinz founded his company in 1869, initially selling horseradish, sauerkraut, vinegar, and pickles. He added “catsup” to his product line in 1876. Rather than making medical claims, Heinz marketed the sauce as wholesome and reliable. Ketchup’s final leap into mainstream American food culture came with the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, which introduced stricter standards for hygiene, safety, and consistency in manufactured food. Companies like Heinz leaned into this, running ads that framed their products as safer than anything you could make at home. Consumers bought in, and commercially bottled ketchup became a kitchen staple within a generation.
Modern Science and Lycopene
Here’s the twist: the 1830s hucksters weren’t entirely wrong about tomatoes, even if their specific claims were nonsense. Tomatoes are rich in lycopene, a natural pigment first isolated from the fruit in 1903. Lycopene is one of the more potent antioxidants found in food, and modern research has linked it to a surprisingly wide range of health effects.
Clinical studies and meta-analyses have found that lycopene can reduce fasting blood sugar in people with type 2 diabetes, improve blood vessel function and lower triglyceride levels in heart disease patients, and decrease markers of chronic inflammation throughout the body. Research published in the Journal of Nutrition and Metabolism documents protective effects on the liver, kidneys, lungs, bones, and nervous system. Higher blood levels of lycopene are associated with lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease mortality, and lycopene supplementation has been shown to improve sperm quality and reduce DNA fragmentation in sperm cells.
None of this means ketchup is medicine. But the basic intuition that tomatoes are genuinely good for you has more scientific backing than the 19th-century con artists could have imagined.
Other Condiments With Medicinal Origins
Ketchup isn’t the only condiment that started in a pharmacy. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, herbs and spices like turmeric, cinnamon, cloves, pepper, and mustard seed were sold in pharmacies as both seasonings and medicine, according to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Mustard was commonly used in plasters and ointments as a topical treatment for chest colds, croup, rheumatic pain, and sore muscles.
Worcestershire sauce has pharmaceutical roots too. It was created in 1837 by John Wheeley Lea and William Henry Perrins, who were local chemists (the British term for pharmacists) in Worcester, England. They concocted a batch, forgot about it for 18 months, and returned to find it had fermented into something delicious enough to bottle and sell.
Angostura bitters, now a staple behind every cocktail bar, began as straight-up military medicine. In 1824, Dr. Johann Siegert, a German surgeon serving as Surgeon General for the armies of Simón Bolívar in Venezuela, perfected a formula for an aromatic tincture designed to treat stomach ailments in soldiers. He called it “Amargo Aromatico,” and it worked well enough in his medical practice that he eventually commercialized it. Nearly 200 years later, the same recipe is still in production, though it’s far more likely to end up in a Manhattan than a field hospital.