BEHIND ketchup's red squirty-ness lies a fascinating story. A survey this week by Little Chef discovered that the North of England was the only part of the entire United Kingdom to prefer brown sauce to ketchup on its fry-ups.

Seventy per cent in the north preferred brown whereas 80 per cent in the south opted for red. Brown sauce got its name because it is a sauce that is brown. But ketchup is far more colourful. It started off as ketsiap in Canton in China from where it spread to Malaya, known as kechap. British sailors discovered kechap in the 1600s and brought it home. But it wasn't a tomato-orientated sauce back then. It was a spicy, salty fishy sauce - a soy or an oyster sauce.

The British modified this sauce, calling it catchup, and adding mushrooms, oysters and walnuts to it. Early in the 18th century, they modified its name to ketchup, and the first ketchup recipe of 1727 had ingredients including anchovies, shallots, vinegar, white wine plus cloves, ginger, mace and nutmeg with, finally, pepper and lemon peel.

It wasn't until 1802 that James Mease, an American living in Nova Scotia, put together a recipe for "love-apple ketchup". The love-apple was a South American fruit, much admired by the Aztecs, which was known to the wider world as the tomato.

The British, though, didn't take to this vivid, gloopy tomato ketchup. In their country, it was marketed as "tomato chutney" while they ploughed on making their thin, transparent ketchups out of cherry, cranberry, cucumber, currant, damson, elderberry, grape, kidney bean, lemon, double mushroom, peach, red or green pepper, raspberry and, in 1817, rum pudding.

Globalisation caught up with the Brits when, in 1872, HJ Heinz added tomato ketchup to his varieties of pickled products and soon the homegrown, watery, sweety ketchups disappeared.

Today, it is estimated that 840 million bottles of tomato ketchup are sold around the world, making it the globe's favourite sauce - except, of course, in the North of England.

THERE is, of course, a problem with surveys in that their results are often to be taken with a pinch of salt.

For example, there was a headline in yesterday's paper saying 'Super council backed by poll'. A Mori poll into people's preferences should local government be reorganised to fit in with regional government said that 36 per cent wanted Durham County to become the single tier of local government.

It said that 27 per cent wanted Durham split into three smaller unitary authorities, and 18 per cent wanted two unitary authorities. The county council, fighting for its life, naturally suggested it had won a popular victory over the district councils. But you could read the poll as saying that 45 per cent want either two or three unitary authorities whereas just 36 per cent want the county council to remain. This would in fact be a defeat for the county and a rejection of the 'super-council'.

AND, of course, you always wonders who exactly carries out these surveys. Gateshead gran Marion Richardson had an itchy right hand and so, remembering that it meant that money was on the way, checked her Lottery numbers. She had won £16m.

If she had had an itchy nose, it would have been quite different. Because, according to a survey conducted a few years back by some very strange people, an itchy nose means that you will be kissed, cursed or become vexed, or shake hands with a fool or run into a gatepost.