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Elderberry Ketchup, for Fish Sauce
Pick a pint of ripe elderberries from the stalks, and put them into an earthen jar. Pour over them a pint of boiling vinegar, and let them remain in a cool oven all night. Strain the liquor from the berries without squeezing them, and put it into a saucepan with an ounce of shallots, a blade of mace, an inch of whole ginger, a tea-spoonful of cloves, and a tea-spoonful of peppercorns. Boil for six or eight minutes, and bottle the ketchup, when cold, with the spices. Sufficient for one pint and a half of ketchup. Probable cost, 1s.
A spiced elderberry vinegar in the old sense of "ketchup" — thin, dark, pungent, meant to be splashed into fish sauces rather than poured on a plate. The whole method is a long warm infusion followed by a short boil.
- "A cool oven" overnightThis means the falling heat of a range that has been shut down for the night: a low residual warmth rather than a measured temperature. A modern approximation is to heat the oven to about 200F, turn it off, and leave the covered jar inside; a low slow cooker on Warm or a wide-mouth vacuum flask does much the same job.
- Ripe berries onlyPick over the fruit and discard every stem, leaf and green or underripe berry. Elder stems and foliage contain cyanogenic compounds and are not food; only the fully ripe black berries belong in the jar, and here they are both scalded and boiled.
- Imperial pintsCassell's pint is 20 fl oz (about 570 ml), not 16. The finished yield of a pint and a half is therefore about 850 ml — roughly three and a half cups.
- The vinegarA British book of this date most likely intends malt vinegar, which would give the ketchup its dark savoury edge. Cider vinegar works; wine vinegar reads thinner and sharper. Any vinegar at 5 percent acidity is fine.
- VesselsUse glass, glazed stoneware or stainless steel throughout. Hot vinegar will strip aluminium, unlined copper and cast iron and take on a metallic taste.
- A blade of maceOne whole piece of the dried aril from a nutmeg, about a quarter teaspoon of ground mace if that is all you have. An ounce of shallots is one large or two small, peeled and left whole or halved.
- Strain without squeezingThe instruction matters. Pressing the berries pushes pulp and tannin through and the ketchup turns cloudy and gritty in the bottle. Let it drip through a jelly bag or a sieve lined with muslin.
- Bottling and keepingBottle into scalded glass with tight non-corroding caps, spices and all, and expect the flavour to keep developing for a month or two. The acidity keeps it well in a cool dark cupboard; refrigerate once opened, and discard any bottle that shows mould or fizzing.
- Using itA tablespoon or two lifts a butter sauce, a court-bouillon or melted butter for oily fish. It is a seasoning, not a dipping sauce, and is too astringent to use by the spoonful.
"Ketchup" in Victorian usage meant a thin, dark, keeping liquid — the word came into English from the East India trade, its derivation contested but most often traced to a Hokkien Chinese term, possibly transmitted by way of Malay kicap, and was applied to mushroom, walnut, oyster and elderberry versions long before tomato took the name over. Elderberry ketchup belongs to a family of English hedgerow condiments that also includes pontack sauce, an elderberry-and-vinegar preparation generally said to be named for Pontack's, the fashionable seventeenth-century London tavern kept by the Bordeaux wine family Pontac; both were made in late summer when elders were heavy with fruit and cost the household nothing but labour. Its place in Cassell's among fish sauces reflects a kitchen that expected to keep a shelf of sharp bottled seasonings on hand year-round, in the same role a modern cook gives Worcestershire sauce or anchovy paste.