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Cucumber Catsup
Three dozen cucumbers and eighteen onions peeled and chopped very fine; sprinkle over them three-fourths pint table-salt, put the whole in a sieve, and let drain well over night; add a tea-cup mustard seed, half tea-cup ground black pepper; mix well, and cover with good cider vinegar. - Mrs. Hattie Clemmons, Asheville, N..C.
An uncooked, salt-drained relish rather than a smooth sauce — nothing here is heated, so the salt, the draining and the vinegar do all the preserving. Scale it down unless you want most of a gallon.
- The hinge: drain hardThe overnight salting is what keeps this from turning into cloudy vegetable soup. Let it drain in a colander or sieve until the flow stops, then press the mass gently; do not rinse, since the recipe's seasoning assumes the salt that clings.
- Three-fourths pint of saltThat is about 1 1/2 cups of fine table salt for roughly 36 cucumbers and 18 onions — a curing quantity, not a seasoning quantity, and most of it leaves with the drained liquid. If you quarter the recipe, quarter the salt with it.
- Tea-cup and half tea-cupOn the usual nineteenth-century reckoning a tea-cup is somewhere between 4 and 6 fl oz; taking it at 6, a tea-cup of mustard seed is roughly 3/4 cup and the black pepper about 6 tablespoons. The pepper is aggressive by modern taste; half that amount is defensible.
- Cucumber sizeNineteenth-century garden cucumbers were often large and seedy. Peel, and scrape out the watery seed cores of anything thick before chopping.
- "Good cider vinegar"Use commercial cider vinegar at 5 percent acidity and cover the vegetables completely, topping up as they settle. Home or barrel vinegar of unknown strength is not a substitute here, since the vinegar is the only preservative once the salting is done.
- StorageThe recipe gives no sealing or processing step, and none should be improvised. Pack into clean jars, keep it refrigerated and submerged, and treat it as a few weeks' condiment rather than a pantry preserve.
- YieldThe recipe states no yield, but 36 cucumbers and 18 onions make a very large batch — several quarts even after draining. A quarter batch — 9 cucumbers, 4 or 5 onions — is a more sensible trial run.
- What it tastes likeSharp, salty and mustard-forward, closer to a chow-chow than to bottled ketchup. It is meant to be spooned beside cold meat, boiled beef or fried fish rather than poured.
In 1877, when Buckeye Cookery was compiled from Ohio housekeepers' contributions, "catsup" still meant almost any thin, keenly spiced condiment sauce built on a single ingredient — mushroom, walnut, oyster, gooseberry, cucumber — and the tomato version had not yet swallowed the word. The name itself is usually traced to the Hokkien Chinese kê-tsiap, possibly by way of Malay kecap, though the etymology is contested; either way it helps explain why so many early catsups are salty and pungent rather than sweet. Cucumber catsups belong to the late-summer glut: a household with a row of cucumbers coming in at once needed a way to hold them without a stove, and salt plus vinegar did it. That the recipe carries a name and a town — Mrs. Hattie Clemmons of Asheville, North Carolina — is typical of the book, whose contributors ranged well beyond Ohio and were credited by name.