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Old-time Tomato Catsup
Slice a peck of ripe tomatoes and two dozen onions. Let them boil one hour. Then press through a sieve. Add one quart of vinegar, one pint of port wine, one tablespoonful of ground cloves, one tablespoonful of allspice, half an ounce of mace, four nutmegs, grated, one tablespoonful and a half of pepper, one scant teaspoonful of cayenne, and half a cup of salt.
Scald over the fire and store in fruit jars or in bottles, covering the corks with sealing wax.
Tomato Catsup (Canned Tomatoes) I can of tomatoes a teaspoonful of salt 1/2 an onion, grated 2 tablespoonfuls of sugar 1/4 a teaspoonful of ground cloves 3 a teaspoonful of paprika a teaspoonful of cinnamon branches of parsley, chopped I celery stalk 1/2 a cup of vinegar Let all simmer together until reduced to about one pint; press through a sieve, reheat, and store in a can. A slice from a clove of garlic is an improvement to the catsup.
Both of these are shelf-stable preserving recipes, and neither includes any heat process that would make them safe to keep at room temperature. The notes below explain where they fail and what the archaic measures mean.
- No thermal process at all"Scald over the fire and store in fruit jars or in bottles" is the whole preservation step. Scalding is well below the temperature and duration needed to make a sealed jar safe for pantry storage, and the second version simply says "reheat, and store in a can." Neither gives a boiling-water-bath time, a jar temperature, or a headspace.
- Corks and sealing waxA waxed cork is not a hermetic seal. It cannot hold a vacuum, and as the contents cool it can draw air and microbes back in. Screw-band and two-piece lid systems later displaced corking and waxing in home canning.
- The vegetables lower the acidityTwo dozen onions to a peck of tomatoes, and in the second recipe onion, celery, parsley and garlic, dilute the acid of an already borderline-acid fruit. The quart of vinegar helps but no final acidity is specified or measured, so there is no way to know the batch lands in the safe range. Unacidified, low-acid vegetable purees held anaerobically at room temperature are the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum.
- Salt and spice are not preservatives hereHalf a cup of salt in several quarts of finished catsup, and a spoonful each of cloves and allspice, season the sauce; they do not sterilize it. Period recipes leaned on salt, vinegar and spice as preservatives, and some commercial makers of the era additionally used sodium benzoate, which this recipe does not have.
- If you want tomato catsupUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, which will specify vinegar strength, a measured processing time, and jar size. Do not adapt the quantities above into a canning schedule.
- What a peck isA peck of tomatoes is 8 dry quarts, on the order of 12 to 13 lb. Two dozen onions alongside it is a very large proportion by modern taste.
- Ambiguous spice measuresHalf an ounce of mace is roughly 3 tablespoons once ground, a startling amount. Four whole nutmegs grated yield somewhere in the region of 8 to 12 teaspoons. "One can of tomatoes" in this period most likely means a No. 2 can, about 20 fl oz, though larger No. 3 cans of tomatoes were also sold; either way, not the 28 oz can standard now.
- The second recipe's line breaksThe ingredient list has been mangled in typesetting: "a teaspoonful of ground cloves 3 a teaspoonful of paprika" and "3 branches of parsley" have run together. Read it as 3 branches of parsley and one teaspoonful each of cloves and paprika.
Catsup reached English kitchens as a word before it was ever made with tomatoes: it is generally traced to a Hokkien term for a fermented fish brine, borrowed through Southeast Asian trade, and eighteenth-century English cooks applied it to thin, dark, heavily spiced keeping-sauces of mushrooms, walnuts, oysters or anchovies. Tomato versions appear in American cookbooks from the early nineteenth century onward, and the port wine, mace and whole nutmegs of the "old-time" version above are a direct inheritance from those earlier savory catsups, when the sauce was a condiment poured by the spoonful rather than the thick sweet ketchup of later commercial bottling. The second recipe, built on a can of tomatoes and finished in a pint, shows the shift under way in the era of this book: the household preserver was beginning to buy the tomatoes already canned, while the factories that supplied them were fighting over whether benzoate of soda belonged in the bottle.