Ketchup was once sold in pill form as a cure for indigestion.

In the 1830s, an Ohio physician named John Cook Bennett claimed tomatoes could cure diarrhea, indigestion, and jaundice, and a businessman named Archibald Miles turned the idea into a product: dried tomato extract compressed into pills and sold as “Dr. Miles’ Compound Extract of Tomato.” The pills were marketed aggressively as a miracle cure, competing with dozens of other patent medicines of the era.

The medicinal fad collapsed within a few years once rival manufacturers exposed the pills as ineffective, but the tomato itself kept its new popularity in American kitchens. What survived was the recipe development that followed — bottled tomato condiments took off commercially in the decades after, culminating in Heinz’s mass-produced ketchup by the 1870s. The plant that briefly posed as medicine ended up as the condiment shelf staple.