Plum Catsup
Stew plums until soft, rub them through a colander, six pounds plums to three pounds sugar; cinnamon, cloves and allspice to taste.
Cook one hour and bottle when cool.
A fruit catsup in the older sense: a sweet spiced plum puree served alongside cold meat, not a tomato sauce. The proportions are sound, but the storage instruction is the part that needs rethinking.
- Scale it downSix pounds of plums to three pounds of sugar makes a very large batch, more than most kitchens want to process at once. A quarter batch — 1 1/2 lb plums, 12 oz sugar — is more manageable and cooks down faster in a wide pan.
- Which plumsTart, clingy varieties do the most work here: damsons, Italian prune plums, or any underripe market plum. Sweet dessert plums give a flat, syrupy result and may need a squeeze of lemon.
- Stewing and sievingAdd only a splash of water to start the plums releasing juice, then keep the heat low until the skins collapse. A food mill or a fine sieve does the colander's job better and leaves the stones and skins behind cleanly.
- SpicesGround cinnamon, cloves and allspice tend to leave the catsup muddy in colour and can feel slightly gritty after an hour of cooking. Whole spices tied in cloth and fished out avoid that — try a 2-inch cinnamon stick, 6 cloves and 6 allspice berries per pound of plums as a starting point, tasting as it reduces.
- The hour of cookingAn hour is a guide, not a rule; what matters is the consistency. Stir often over low heat, since a sugar-heavy fruit puree scorches on the bottom well before it looks like it might. It is done when a spoon drawn through leaves a track that fills in slowly.
- No vinegarUnlike most nineteenth-century catsups, this one has no vinegar, so it is closer to a spiced plum butter. If you want the sharper, more sauce-like character the name implies, a few tablespoons of cider vinegar stirred in near the end is in keeping with period practice.
- Do not bottle when coolFilling containers with cooled puree leaves no barrier to mold and yeast, and this is not a shelf-stable product. Refrigerate it and use it within a few weeks, freeze it, or follow a current tested water-bath canning process for fruit preserves with the jars and headspace that process specifies.
- ServingTreat it as a condiment rather than a jam: a spoonful with cold ham, roast pork, game or sharp cheese.
Before ketchup meant tomatoes, it meant almost any thick, keeping, well-spiced sauce poured over plain meat — mushroom, walnut, oyster and anchovy catsups all appear in English and American cookbooks long before the tomato version took over. Fruit catsups belong to the American end of that tradition: gooseberry, grape, currant and plum versions fill the preserving chapters of household books from roughly the 1870s through the early 1900s, when a heavy plum crop had to be dealt with in a week. The cinnamon-cloves-allspice trio, left to the cook's taste rather than measured, was the standard sweet-spice signature of the period and the same one that flavored mincemeat, spiced currants and pickled peaches.