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Poulac Ketchup
Take a quart of ripe elderberries, measured after they have been stripped from the stalks. Put them into a deep jar, and pour over them a pint and a half of boiling vinegar. Place the jar in a cool oven overnight. Next day strain the liquid without squeezing the fruit, and put it into a saucepan with an inch of whole ginger, two blades of mace, a tea-spoonful of pepper-corns, a tea-spoonful of salt, half a tea-spoonful of cloves, and eight shallots. Boil all together for five or six minutes, then pour the ketchup out, and when cold, put it with the spice into small bottles, which must be corked and sealed securely. If liked, half a pound of boned anchovies may be put into the liquid with the spices, and stirred gently until they have dissolved. Probable cost, uncertain. Sufficient for four half-pint bottles.
A Victorian spiced elderberry vinegar of the type usually called Pontack sauce, meant to be kept months and used a spoonful at a time. Two things decide whether it works: keeping green stems and unripe fruit out of the jar, and straining the steeped berries without pressing them.
- Strip the fruit completelyOnly the ripe, fully purple berries go in. Elder stems, leaves and green berries carry cyanogenic compounds and a rank flavour; comb the heads with a fork over a bowl and pick out any green or reddish berries and every scrap of stalk.
- "A cool oven overnight"A cool oven in a Victorian range is conventionally reckoned at somewhere around 200-250F, and here it may amount to no more than the falling heat of a fire left to die. In a modern oven, set the lowest temperature you have (usually 170-200F), leave the covered jar an hour or two, then switch off and let it stand overnight in the closed oven.
- UnitsThese are imperial measures: a pint and a half of vinegar is about 30 fl oz, roughly 3 3/4 US cups, and an imperial quart of picked berries a little over 4 US cups. Use a plain malt or cider vinegar at about 5 percent acidity; the acid is what preserves the finished sauce.
- Do not squeezePressing the fruit pushes pulp and fine sediment through and the bottles cloud and throw a deposit. Let it drip through a scalded cloth or fine sieve of its own weight, however long that takes.
- Spice quantitiesMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg; equivalents vary, but a scant 1/4 teaspoon of ground mace is a reasonable stand-in for two blades. An inch of whole ginger here most probably means dried root, bruised, rather than fresh. The eight shallots should be peeled and left whole or halved.
- The spice goes in the bottleDividing the boiled spices and shallots between the bottles means the sauce keeps extracting flavour for weeks. It also means the first bottle opened tastes milder than the last; give it a month before judging it.
- The anchovy versionHalf a pound of salt-packed anchovies, rinsed and boned, will break down in the hot vinegar with patient stirring. This variant is a fish sauce rather than a fruit vinegar and is best kept refrigerated once bottled, and once opened in any case.
- Bottles and yieldFour half-pint bottles, sterilised. The recipe directs that the sauce go in cold, with the spice, and that the bottles be corked and sealed securely. Store in the dark. A spoonful in gravy for mutton or game, or in place of Worcestershire.
The name is very likely a garbling of Pontac or Pontack ketchup, a name used in English for spiced elderberry vinegar, and it is generally traced to Pontack's Head, the London tavern run by the Bordeaux wine family of Pontac after the Great Fire, whose name became shorthand for expensive claret. Elderberries were free and abundant in every English hedgerow, and their dark juice was widely used to imitate or stretch red wine, so a sauce that tasted of vinegar, spice and something like claret earned a fashionable name it could not otherwise afford. Cassell's places it among the ketchups because in Victorian usage a ketchup was any strained, spiced, bottled liquid seasoning, most often mushroom, walnut or oyster, and the anchovy variant here shows the family resemblance to Worcestershire and the other fermented fish sauces that were growing in prominence by the end of the century.