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Tomato Catsup
The tomatoes must be fresh and fully ripe. Scald them and press through a sieve that will retain all the seeds and skins. To each gallon thus prepared, when cold, add four tablespoonfuls of salt, three of ground mustard, two of black pepper, one of allspice, half as much cloves, and half as much cayenne pepper; also a pint of the strongest cider or wine vinegar. Simmer the whole together for four hours. Bottle and cork tight.
XI. Condiments.
This is an open-kettle bottling method from an era before anyone measured pH or processed jars, and the preserving instructions are the part that fails. The seasoning proportions are worth reading; the storage plan is not.
- Not enough acid for the volumeOne pint of vinegar to a gallon of strained tomato pulp is about one part in eight, and some of that acetic acid may be driven off or buffered over four hours of simmering. Modern tested ketchup recipes specify their vinegar ratios precisely because the finished pH has to be reliably below 4.6, and there is no way to know from this recipe whether it is.
- Corked bottles are an anaerobic container"Bottle and cork tight" creates the oxygen-free, room-temperature environment in which Clostridium botulinum spores can germinate if the finished acidity is not low enough. The spores survive simmering; four hours at a simmer does not reliably destroy them.
- No processing step at allThe hot catsup goes into bottles that are never sterilised, sealed with corks that cannot hold a vacuum, and given no boiling-water bath. Any organism introduced at the filling stage stays in the bottle.
- Modern tomatoes are less acidicModern tomatoes may be less acidic -- It is often said that cultivars bred through the twentieth century for sweetness sit at a higher pH than older field tomatoes. The evidence for that is mixed, but ripeness and fruit condition can push some tomatoes near or above pH 4.6, which does nothing to improve an already unknown margin.
- The spices do nothing preservativeMustard, allspice, cloves and cayenne contribute flavour and a faint antimicrobial effect at best. Salt at four tablespoons to the gallon is a seasoning quantity, not a curing one. Nothing here is holding the catsup safe.
- If you want to make catsupUse a current tested recipe with a specified vinegar ratio and a boiling-water-bath time, or make a small batch and keep it refrigerated as a fresh sauce. Do not shelf-store this one.
Catsup began as a preserved condiment rather than a tomato product: the name is generally traced to a Southeast Asian fermented fish sauce, ke-tsiap or similar, carried into English through Dutch and British trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. English cooks applied the word to any thin, strongly spiced keeping sauce, and mushroom, walnut and oyster catsups were standard long before tomatoes joined them; American cookbooks of the nineteenth century list several kinds side by side. Tomato catsup became the dominant version in the United States over the second half of that century, and recipes like this one — pulp, salt, mustard, allspice, cloves, cayenne, a little vinegar, and a long reduction — were still household routine when this book was compiled, at the point where commercially bottled brands were taking the job over. The four-hour simmer is doing double duty as thickening and as the only heat treatment the sauce receives, which is the assumption that dates the recipe most clearly.