There's something undeniably American about ketchup.

It's the sidekick to fries, the burger's trusty companion.

The must have condiment at every cookout.

Beyond that, without ketchup, we wouldn't have other great condiments like Russian dressing, steak sauce, Kansas City style barbecue, and even cocktail sauce.

It truly is the tangy red ribbon tying together some of our favorite comfort foods.

But like so many American classics, its story has far more of a global reach than you'd expect.

Roughly 97% of American households have a bottle of ketchup in their fridge right now.

We buy somewhere in the ballpark of 10 billion ounces annually, which comes out to about three bottles per person per year.

But ketchup's journey doesn't start in America.

It doesn't begin in a factory, or even in a tomato field for that matter.

Its roots stretch all the way back to 300 BCE in ancient China, where the first versions didn't use tomato.

Hailing from southern China, these sauces were fermented pastes made from fish entrails, meat byproducts, and soybeans.

They were pungent, tangy and salty.

They were also easy to store and had a long shelf life, making them perfect for ocean voyages.

Over time, these early versions of ketchup made their way to Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, and other parts of Southeast Asia through trade routes.

It's along these routes that food historians believe British traders intercepted the condiment in the late 1600s, appearing in the Oxford Dictionary for the first time in 1682.

The first known English recipe for ketchup was in Eliza Smith's Compleat Housewife, published in 1727.

Her version combined anchovy, horseradish, lemon peel, shallot, vinegar and white wine with spices like clove, ginger, mace, nutmeg and peppercorns.

This English katchup, as it was called, was pretty close to Worcestershire sauce, which would make its debut about a century later.

Richard Bradley is another pioneer of English ketchup.

He published two different recipes in 1728, only one year after Smith's English Katchup.

One of Bradley's recipes was a riff on a soy based sauce that he claimed originated in what we would know today as Indonesia.

But since he didn't have access to soy beans, he used red beans instead, blending them together in a paste with cayenne, powdered clove, nutmeg, mace, pepper, minced garlic, and orange juice.

The other was the first ever published recipe for mushroom ketchup, which called for mushrooms, clove, mace, and port wine.

It was a dark, savory condiment that Pride and Prejudice author Jane Austen was apparently a big fan of.

It's hard to say exactly when tomatoes found their way into ketchup.

There are anecdotes of ketchup-like tomato sauces popping up from Nova Scotia to Louisiana, but the first known tomato ketchup recipe was published in 1812 by Philadelphia scientists and horticulturalist James Mease, who referred to tomatoes as love apples.

Made from unstrained love apple pulp, spices and brandy, Mease's recipe was more like a boozy tomato gazpacho.

The inception of tomato ketchup coincided with the rise of large scale commercial bottling and canning.

In fact, the first cannery opened in New York City the same year Mease published his recipe, and the first ketchup bottles hit the shelves in 1837.

Commercial bottling and canning was a game changer for the American food industry, and only increased in popularity through the 1800s due to a couple of things.

First, America's growing railroad industry expanded shipping across the United States, allowing farmers and other food manufacturers to preserve their goods in mass quantities and find new markets for their products.

Second, soldiers relied on canned rations to stay fed on the front lines of the American Civil War.

Around this time, the ketchup industry was really starting to boom.

But there was one major flaw in these early tomato based recipes they didn't keep well at all.

Ketchups were designed to be shelf stable, a feature not a bug, of their fermented origin.

Unfortunately, tomatoes decompose fairly quickly, and because their season is relatively short, early commercial ketchup producers had a tough time preserving tomato pulp year round.

In 1866, French cookbook author Pierre Blot called commercial ketchup filthy, decomposed, and putrid" because of the amount of bacteria, spores, yeasts, and mold they often contained.

In an attempt to extend tomato ketchup's short shelf life, producers added dangerous amounts of preservatives, including boric acid, formalin, salicylic acid, and benzoic acid.

Because these early ketchups looked unappetizing, often described as looking muddy and brown, coal tar was used to create a bright red color to mimic freshly ripe tomatoes in hopes of enticing customers.

By the late 1800s, there were growing concerns surrounding the preservatives in bottled ketchup, and consumers were becoming suspicious of industrial canning.

To solve ketchup's preservation problem, industrial manufacturers started adding vinegar and salt to prevent spoilage, and sugar to balance out the sourness.

But the first person to strike the perfect balance of sweet, salty, sour and umami, and bottle what would become an iconic American flavor, was Pittsburgh based food scientist Henry J. Heinz.

In 1876, in order to regain the trust of American customers, Heinz developed a recipe that leveraged tomatoes' naturally occurring preservative pectin, as well as distilled vinegar, brown sugar, salt, and other spices.

He even sold his ketchup in clear glass bottles so customers could see the freshness of his product.

By 1905, Heinz's company sold 5 million bottles of ketchup.

Today, the company produces 660 million bottles of ketchup per year, distributed all over the world.

Through the 20th century, as diners and fast food chains sprouted up across the country, ketchup's popularity continued to skyrocket.

Burgers, French fries, hot dogs, all these fast, easy, and relatively affordable foods that Americans could enjoy, regardless of income or education, became cemented in our country's culinary identity.

And ketchup, the red glue that held all these dishes together, became America's great equalizer.

The love of ketchup isn't bound to America's borders.

Ketchup flavored chips are wildly popular in Canada.

Ketchup is also a popular pizza topping in places like Trinidad, Lebanon, and Poland.

In Japan, ketchup is often used as a substitute for tomato sauce on pasta, and in Germany, the popular street food currywurst is topped with ketchup mixed with curry powder.