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Currant Catsup
Four pounds nice fully-ripe currants, one and a half pounds sugar, table-spoon ground cinnamon, a tea-spoon each of salt, ground cloves and pepper, pint vinegar; stew currants and sugar until quite thick, add other ingredients, and bottle for use.
A fruit catsup of the old school: sweet, sour and heavily spiced, meant to sit on the table beside roast meat rather than on a hamburger. Nothing here is difficult, but the original leaves out the two things a modern cook wants, which are how long to cook it and how to keep it.
- Which currantsRed currants are the usual choice and give the brightest acidity; black currants work and produce a much darker, more resinous sauce. Four pounds is roughly 13 to 16 cups of stemmed fruit. Frozen currants are fine and in fact break down faster.
- A pint of vinegarTwo cups. Cider vinegar at 5 percent acidity is the sensible modern choice, though the strength of household vinegar in the nineteenth century varied and cannot be pinned to a figure. The recipe reads as though the vinegar goes in with the spices at the end, and that is the better order anyway.
- "Stew until quite thick"Currants and sugar over low heat will take 40 minutes to an hour to reduce to a heavy, jammy mass, stirring often once it thickens, since the sugar catches easily. Adding the vinegar afterwards thins it again, so plan on another 15 to 20 minutes of simmering to bring it back.
- Seeds and skinsThe original leaves both in, which gives a coarse, gritty sauce. Pressing the cooked fruit through a sieve or food mill before the vinegar and spices go in produces something far closer to what most people now expect from a catsup, at the cost of maybe a quarter of the volume.
- Spices at the endGround cinnamon, cloves and pepper added late keep their aroma; boiled for an hour they turn flat and dusty. A teaspoon of cloves in this quantity is assertive but not out of line for the period, and the unqualified "pepper" is most likely black pepper.
- Bottling"Bottle for use" assumed a cool cellar and fairly quick consumption. This is a high-acid mixture, but for shelf storage today use a current tested procedure for a boiling-water bath; otherwise pack into clean jars, refrigerate, and use within a couple of months.
- Yield and servingYield depends on how far you reduce it; expect somewhere in the range of four to seven half-pint jars, fewer if you sieve. A sauce of this kind would have gone with cold roast beef, mutton, game or pork, and it holds up well against duck or a strong cheese.
Before catsup meant tomatoes, it meant almost any thin spiced condiment sauce put up in bottles: mushroom, walnut, oyster, cucumber, grape, gooseberry and currant all appear in American and English cookbooks through the nineteenth century, and Buckeye Cookery groups them together because they were understood as one family. The word itself is generally traced to a Southeast Asian fermented fish sauce carried into English by traders in the seventeenth century, which is why the older recipes are so often salty, sour and dark rather than sweet. Currants suited the form well: they are astringent, high in acid and pectin, and a currant bush in the yard produced a glut all at once that had to be dealt with in a few days. Sugar and vinegar together were one answer, and the resulting bottles carried the taste of summer fruit through a winter of salt pork and roast meat.