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Tomato Catsup (Half bushel tomatoes four)
Half bushel tomatoes, four ounces salt, three ounces ground black pepper, one ounce cinnamon, half ounce ground cloves, one drachm cayenne pepper, one gallon vinegar; slice the tomatoes and stew in their own liquor until soft, and rub through a sieve fine enough to retain the seeds; boil the pulp and juice down to the consistency of apple-butter (very thick), stirring steadily all the time to prevent burning; then add the vinegar with which a small tea-cup sugar and the spices have been mixed, boil up twice, remove from fire, let cool and bottle. Those who like the flavor of onions may add about half a dozen medium-sized ones, peeled and sliced, fifteen minutes before the vinegar and spices are put in. -Mrs. M. M. Munsell, Delaware, Ohio.
This is a farmhouse-scale batch built for a September tomato glut: roughly fifty pounds of fruit reduced over most of a day. Almost everything here scales down cleanly by eight, and the technique holds up.
- Half a bushelA bushel of tomatoes runs 50-56 lb, so a half bushel is about 25-28 lb, or two pecks. To make an eighth of the batch, use about 3 lb of tomatoes.
- A drachmAn apothecaries' drachm is one-eighth of an apothecaries' ounce, about 3.9 g; the avoirdupois dram is 1/16 oz, about 1.8 g. Either way it is between one and two teaspoons of ground cayenne, and at full batch size that is mild heat.
- The spicing is heavy by modern standardsThree ounces of ground black pepper is about three-quarters of a cup, and an ounce of cinnamon roughly a quarter cup. This is a peppery, dark condiment closer to a nineteenth-century steak sauce than to bottled ketchup, and the small teacup of sugar (somewhere between a half and three-quarters of a cup) is seasoning rather than sweetening. Cut the pepper if you want something more familiar.
- VinegarA gallon of household vinegar today is 5 percent acetic acid; the vinegar of the 1870s varied in strength. Use plain cider or distilled white vinegar and do not dilute it, as the acid is doing the preserving work as much as the flavouring.
- The reduction is the whole jobCooking tomato pulp down to the thickness of apple butter takes hours, and the thicker it gets the faster it catches. Use the widest heavy pan you have, keep the heat moderate, and stir to the corners of the pan. A scorched batch cannot be rescued; the burnt note carries through the whole batch.
- Sieving"Fine enough to retain the seeds" means a food mill fitted with a medium plate, or a conical sieve worked with a pestle. Do not use a blender first, as chopped seeds and skin turn the catsup bitter and gritty.
- Boil up twiceAfter the spiced vinegar goes in, bring the pot to a full boil, let it settle, and bring it up again. The likely purpose is to drive off the raw edge of the vinegar and marry the spices, and it takes only a few minutes.
- StorageThe instruction to cool and bottle assumes a cool cellar and rapid use. Treat the finished catsup as a refrigerator condiment, where it keeps for months, or process filled jars by a current tested water-bath method for tomato products. Tomato acidity varies with variety and ripeness, which is why untested shelf storage of tomato products is no longer advised.
Catsup began as a borrowed word before it was a tomato product: the name is generally traced to a Southeast Asian fermented fish sauce, ke-tsiap, which English cooks adopted as a term for any thin, dark, keeping sauce. Through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a catsup was as likely to be made of walnuts, mushrooms or oysters as of anything red. Tomato catsup came late and then took over, and by the time Buckeye Cookery was assembled from Ohio housewives' contributions in the 1870s it had a section of its own. Recipes like this one, credited to Mrs. M. M. Munsell of Delaware, Ohio, are frankly seasonal industry: a half bushel of ripe tomatoes arrives at once, and the answer is a day at the stove converting them into something that will last the winter. The result is spice-forward and barely sweet, a reminder that the sugar-heavy commercial ketchup of the following century was a different creature that happened to inherit the name.