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Gooseberry Catsup
Nine pounds gooseberries, five pounds sugar, one quart vinegar, three table-spoons cinnamon, one and a half each allspice and cloves. The gooseberries should be nearly or quite ripe. Take off blossoms, wash and put them into a porcelain kettle, mash thoroughly, scald and put through the colander, add sugar and spices, boil fifteen minutes, and add the vinegar cold; bottle immediately before it cools. Ripe grapes prepared by same rule, make an excellent catsup.-Mrs. Col. W. P. Reid, Delaware, Ohio.
A fruit catsup in the older sense: a thin, sweet-sour spiced sauce for meat, not a tomato product. The quantities are large but scale down cleanly by half or a quarter.
- Add the vinegar off the heatThe one instruction that shapes the result is adding the quart of vinegar cold at the end, after the fifteen-minute boil. Boiling vinegar with the fruit drives off some of its volatile acid, so adding it late keeps more of the sharpness.
- Porcelain kettleThis means a porcelain-enamelled iron pot. Any non-reactive pan works: enamelled cast iron or stainless steel. Bare cast iron or unlined copper will discolour the fruit and pick up a metallic taste from the vinegar.
- Scald and put through the colanderHere the colander is doing the work of a sieve or food mill, straining out skins and seeds after the mashed fruit has been heated enough to soften. A food mill or a coarse-mesh sieve with a stiff spatula does it faster.
- GooseberriesThe recipe allows fruit "nearly or quite ripe." Ripe American gooseberries are pinkish to dull red; the green ones sold for pies will work but taste sharper against the sugar.
- Blossoms and stems"Take off blossoms" refers to the dried flower remnant at the tail of each berry. On nine pounds of fruit this is the longest job in the recipe.
- SpicesThe three tablespoons of cinnamon and one and a half each of allspice and cloves are ground spices, which is why they are added with the sugar rather than tied in a bag. That is a heavy hand by modern taste; two-thirds of the amount is plenty for most palates.
- ConsistencyFifteen minutes of boiling leaves a pourable sauce, thinner than tomato ketchup. If you want it to coat a spoon, cook the sweetened pulp longer before the vinegar goes in, watching for scorching as the sugar concentrates.
- Bottling and keeping"Bottle immediately before it cools" is open-kettle sealing, which is no longer relied on for shelf storage. The sauce is acid and very sugary, but for keeping outside the refrigerator use current water-bath canning directions for a fruit catsup; otherwise treat it as a refrigerator sauce.
Fruit catsups were once as ordinary as tomato ones. Before catsup narrowed to mean the tomato bottle, the word covered any thin spiced condiment strained smooth and kept in bottles, and nineteenth-century American cookbooks print versions built on mushrooms, walnuts, currants, grapes, plums and gooseberries alike. Gooseberries suited the job because they are naturally tart and full of pectin, giving the sauce acidity and body without long reduction. Buckeye Cookery (1877), assembled from contributed recipes by Ohio housewives, is thick with such preserving formulas, each signed with the name and town of the woman who supplied it; the note that ripe grapes work by the same rule is the sort of practical aside that marks these as working household recipes rather than editorial invention. Gooseberries were a common kitchen-garden fruit in the Midwest at the time, though plantings declined in the early twentieth century when the bushes were restricted in many states as a host of white pine blister rust.