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Cranberry Catsup
5 pounds cranberries 1 pint vinegar 2½ pounds brown sugar tablespoonful cloves (ground) tablespoonful salt 3 tablespoonfuls cinnamon ½ teaspoonful paprika Cook the cranberries and vinegar about five minutes, or until the berries burst open; press through a fine sieve, add the other ingredients, and let simmer until thick; then store in bottles or as canned fruit, preferably a part in each, some for present use and some for later in the year. 4 ounces salt Chutney (An English Recipe) 4 ounces raisins 3 ounces onions 3 ounces garlic 2 ounces mustard seed ounce cayenne pepper 14 ounces tart apples 2 cups strong vinegar 4 ounces sugar Stone and chop the raisins, chop the onions and garlic fine; chili peppers may replace the cayenne pepper, but if used must be chopped fine; crush the mustard seed. Put all these ingredients when prepared into a mortar, add the salt, and pound as smooth as possible.
The apples are weighed after paring and coring.
To the apples add the vinegar and sugar and let cook until the apples are soft throughout; beat smooth and let cool, then gradually beat in the mixture in the mortar. Store in fruit cans.
Two recipes have run together on this page: a cranberry catsup and an English-style chutney. Both are high-acid vinegar preserves, and both are workable, but the spice quantities and the storage instructions need translating.
- Two recipes, one blockEverything from "4 ounces salt" onward belongs to the chutney, not the catsup. The catsup is cranberries, vinegar, brown sugar, cloves, salt, cinnamon and paprika; nothing else.
- Ounces here are weightThe chutney's ounces are avoirdupois, not fluid: 4 oz salt is about 6 tablespoons, 4 oz raisins about 3/4 cup, 3 oz onion is one small onion, 3 oz garlic is one very large head or, peeled, closer to two. Weigh them rather than guessing.
- The cayenneThe line as printed reads simply "ounce cayenne pepper"; taken as one ounce, that is roughly a third of a cup of ground chile — ferociously hot by current palates, and the recipe assumes a condiment eaten by the teaspoon. Start with a fraction of it and taste.
- Cinnamon and cloves in the catsupThree tablespoons of cinnamon to 5 lb of fruit reads heavy, though heavily spiced fruit catsups were not unusual in books of this kind. Ground spices lose strength with age; old jars will need more than fresh ones.
- Sieving the cranberriesPress the cooked berries through a fine sieve or run them through a food mill to leave skins and seeds behind. A blender will not do the same job — cranberry skins stay gritty.
- "Simmer until thick"Aim for the consistency of a pourable bottled sauce; it will thicken further on cooling because cranberries are exceptionally high in pectin. Stir often once it thickens, as the sugar catches easily.
- The mortarThe chutney's pounded paste is what a food processor does in a minute. Work the raisins, onion, garlic, crushed mustard seed, salt and pepper to a coarse paste before beating it into the cooled apple base.
- "Strong vinegar"This means full-strength cider or malt vinegar, roughly 5 percent acidity — not diluted and not a low-acid wine or specialty vinegar. The acid is what makes both preserves keep.
- Storage"Store in bottles or as canned fruit" is not a process. Follow current boiling-water-bath guidance for a tested cranberry or chutney recipe, or simply refrigerate the finished sauce and use it within a few weeks; the chutney in particular has raw onion and garlic beaten in after cooking.
- YieldFive pounds of cranberries with the sugar and vinegar gives roughly 3 to 4 pints of catsup. The chutney makes about 3 cups.
Before ketchup meant tomatoes, it meant almost any thin, spiced, vinegar-sharp bottled sauce — mushroom, walnut, oyster, gooseberry, grape. Cranberry catsup belongs to that older family, and it is a distinctly North American entry in it, since the cranberry was a native fruit harvested commercially in New England and New Jersey bogs from the early nineteenth century onward. Its natural acidity and enormous pectin content make it almost purpose-built for a keeping sauce. The chutney printed alongside it shows the other current running through preserving books of this period — Anglo-Indian condiments, the word itself from Hindi chatni, filtered through English kitchens and arriving in American cookbooks labeled simply "an English recipe." The pairing on one page is a fair picture of what a well-stocked pantry was expected to hold: something homegrown and something borrowed, both of them sharp enough to wake up a plain roast.