Catsup was developed through a peculiar chain of misunderstandings and reinterpretations; soy-sauce amendments taken from China to India by the East India Company, British naval recipes that advertised themselves principally for long keeping (twenty years on a ship!), tomatoes no earlier than the mid-1700s, possibly introduced by Sephardic Jews who traded with the Americas.
A lot of food history is like that, as is most of this book. Collingham also pays attention to the imitation and the prejudice that food-habits have displayed, especially between Britain and India. She follows curries around the rest of the world, with the odd gap that her knowledge of US curries is limited to the East Coast, principally New York, when their epicenter is more likely Silicon Valley.
I haven't tried any of the recipes, but they look tasty and practical; Bengali potatoes, for instance.
There's a last chapter on how tea-drinking accidentally changed history, but The Empire of Tea covers that better.
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So wrote clew in History (commodity).