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Tomato Catsup
1 nutmeg Scald half a bushel of ripe tomatoes and remove the skins; add half a cup of salt, one pound of sugar, one tablespoonful of cayenne pepper, three teaspoonfuls, each, of ground mace and celery seed, two tablespoonfuls of ground cinnamon, and two quarts of vinegar. Boil slowly until reduced one half, then pass through a sieve, reheat, and store in sealed bottles, or in tight-closed cans. A larger quantity of spice is desired by many. 1/2 bushel tomatoes 6 large onions Tomato Catsup No. 2 2 cups granulated sugar ½ cup salt 1½ quarts white wine vinegar 4 red peppers, chopped fine teaspoonful whole cloves 2 teaspoonfuls stick cinnamon 1 teaspoonful allspice I nutmeg Slice the tomatoes and onions, add the other ingredients and let simmer until quite thick, stirring often; strain and can as any canned article, or store in bottles, using new corks and covering the cork securely with sealing wax.
Two versions of the same preserve, both scaled for a farm kitchen and both sealed by methods that current food-safety guidance no longer accepts. The notes below explain the quantities and where the process fails.
- Why not as writtenNeither version specifies any heat processing after filling: the first says only to reheat and store in sealed bottles or "tight-closed cans," the second to "can as any canned article" or else to cork and seal with wax. No time, temperature or method is given for either. Ketchup is a moist, sealed, room-temperature product, and if the finished acidity is not low enough a sealed unprocessed jar can support the growth of Clostridium botulinum. A current tested recipe with a specified boiling-water process should be used instead.
- The onions are the second problemVersion No. 2 adds six large onions and gives less vinegar than the first version does — 1½ quarts, against 2 quarts for half a bushel (the tomato quantity in No. 2 is printed without a figure). Onions are a low-acid vegetable, and tomato acidity varies by variety and ripeness. There is no way to know from the text whether the finished pH lands below the 4.6 threshold that makes a boiling-water process sufficient.
- Sealing wax and corksWax-dipped corks were a usual closure for bottled sauces and were understood at the time as a barrier against air. They are not a hermetic seal and cannot be tested for vacuum.
- Half a bushel of tomatoesA bushel of tomatoes runs about 53 lb, so half a bushel is roughly 26-27 lb — the point of the recipe is that ripe fruit was arriving faster than a household could eat it. Reduced by half and sieved, the yield is well under two gallons of sauce.
- The spicingMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg seed, warmer and lighter than the nut itself, and was more common in nineteenth-century sauces than it is now. Celery seed, cayenne, cinnamon and cloves are a familiar Anglo-American ketchup profile of the period; the recipe's own note that "a larger quantity of spice is desired by many" indicates the given amounts were on the restrained side for contemporary taste.
- Whole versus ground spiceThe first version uses ground spice, which stays in the finished sauce and darkens it; the second uses whole cloves, stick cinnamon and a whole nutmeg, which were meant to be strained out. The two approaches give noticeably different colour and clarity.
- Sugar and salt as preservativesA pound of sugar and half a cup of salt to half a bushel of fruit is a seasoning level, not a preserving level. In this style of recipe the vinegar is doing essentially all the preservative work, which is why the vinegar-to-vegetable ratio matters so much.
Tomato ketchup began as one member of a large family of thin, spiced, vinegar-based table sauces — the word descends, by general agreement, from a Southeast Asian fermented fish sauce name that reached English through Dutch and Malay traders, and eighteenth-century English cooks made ketchups of mushrooms, walnuts, oysters and anchovies long before tomatoes entered the picture. American recipes turned decisively toward the tomato in the nineteenth century, and by the time this book was written every canning manual carried at least one version, usually two or three. The scale here is the tell: half a bushel or a full bushel of fruit is a single day's glut from a kitchen garden, put up in one long simmering session because there was no other way to keep it. The heavy hand with cinnamon, mace and cloves belongs to the same era, when bottled sauce was expected to taste distinctly of spice rather than of tomato, and when spice itself was quietly understood to help mask a sauce that had begun to turn.