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Tomato Catsup (Take one bushel of firm ripe)
Take one bushel of firm ripe tomatoes-the Feejee Island, known by their pink or purple color, and the "Trophy," are the best and richest varieties for catsup and canning. Wipe them off nicely with a damp cloth, cut out the cores, and put them in a porcelain-lined iron kettle or a genuine bell-metal one. Place over the fire, and pour over them about three pints of water, throw in two large handfuls of peach leaves, with ten or twelve onions or shallots cut fine. Boil until the tomatoes are done, which will take about two hours; then strain through a coarse-mesh sieve, pour the liquid back again into the boiling kettle and add half a gallon of good strong cider vinegar; have ready two ounces ground spice, two ounces ground black pepper, two ounces mustard (either ground or in the seed, as you prefer), one ounce ground cloves, two grated nutmegs, two pounds light brown sugar, and one pint of salt; mix these ingredients well together before putting in the boiler; then boil two hours, stirring continually to prevent burning. If you like the catsup "hot." add cayenne pepper to your taste. When cool, fill bottles (reeded bottles are the nicest, they can be procured at the house furnisher's, and a set will last some time; they look better than ones of all sizes and styles). Cork and seal with bottle-wax so as to exclude the air. Keep in a cool, dry place for future use. This recipe is preferred to all others-it has been used for years. It keeps well, and has been pronounced by competent judges superior to all others. -G. D., Baltimore, Md.
This is a nineteenth-century bulk preserving recipe built around an ingredient no modern cook should put in a kettle. The points below explain where it fails rather than how to rescue it.
- Peach leaves are the disqualifying ingredientPeach leaves are the problem ingredient -- Peach leaves contain cyanogenic glycosides (chiefly prunasin) that release hydrogen cyanide when the leaf tissue is crushed and wetted. They appear in nineteenth-century cookery as a cheap stand-in for bitter almond flavouring, and "two large handfuls" is an unmeasured quantity of an active toxin. The leaves are strained out here and the liquid boiled at length, both of which reduce exposure, but no safe quantity can be calculated from this instruction.
- The seal is not a sealCorking a bottle and dipping it in wax excludes dust and slows evaporation; it does not produce the vacuum or the heat treatment that makes a shelf-stable preserve. The recipe relies on salt, sugar, vinegar and long boiling to carry the load, with no measured final acidity and no processing step, so spoilage organisms in the bottle neck and cork have an open route in.
- Bulk scale and no acidity controlA bushel of tomatoes is roughly 53 lb, thinned with three pints of water and then diluted further by tomato liquid before the half gallon of vinegar goes in. Tomato acidity varies by variety and ripeness, and the final pH here is unknown and unknowable from the text. Use a current tested catsup or ketchup recipe with a specified acidification and canning process.
- Vessels named in the text"Bell-metal" is a high-tin bronze. Bare copper, brass and bell-metal all react with the acid in tomatoes and vinegar; nothing but stainless or enamelled steel belongs in this kind of work now.
- The varieties are goneThe "Feejee" and the "Trophy" were the celebrity tomatoes of the 1870s, the Trophy in particular sold at extravagant prices for its seed. Both survive only in heirloom collections, and the pinkish, thick-fleshed types the writer wanted are best approximated today by paste tomatoes.
- "Ground spice" and a pint of salt"Spice" unqualified in nineteenth-century American cookery commonly meant allspice. A pint of salt is about 20 oz by weight, which with two pounds of sugar tells you the keeping strategy was brute-force osmotic pressure rather than any controlled process.
Buckeye Cookery (1877) collected contributions by initial and city, and "G. D., Baltimore" was writing from the centre of the American canning trade -- Baltimore packers dominated commercial tomato and oyster putting-up in the 1870s. Catsup at this date was a family of pickled condiments rather than one product: walnut, mushroom, oyster and tomato catsups all appear in books of the period, the word itself generally traced to a Southeast Asian fermented fish sauce, by most accounts a Hokkien term reaching English via Malay. Peach-leaf flavouring appears in nineteenth-century custards, cordials and preserves and is the detail that dates the recipe most sharply; it later fell out of use. The boast that the recipe "has been pronounced by competent judges superior to all others" is a common formula in community cookbooks of the era.