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TOMATO KETCHUP (another way) (Boil one bushel of good)
Boil one bushel of good tomatoes until soft, then squeeze through a fine wire sieve. Add half a gallon of vinegar, a few ounces of salt, two ounces of cloves, a quarter of a pound of allspice, an ounce and a half of cayenne pepper, three table-spoonfuls of black pepper, and five heads of garlic skinned and separated. Mix and boil three hours or until reduced one-half, and bottle without straining. The garlic, if objected to, may be omitted.
This is a bulk preserving recipe from the era before anyone measured pH, and the finishing instruction — boil, then bottle — is exactly the step that makes it unsafe to reproduce. The notes below explain the scale, the seasoning and the specific problem.
- Why it fails: sealed, unprocessed, low-acidA bushel of tomatoes is roughly 50-53 lb, and after reduction the half-gallon of vinegar is diluted through an enormous volume of tomato pulp. Tomatoes sit close to the borderline pH of 4.6, and nothing here guarantees the finished sauce lands on the acid side of it. Sealed in bottles with no measured acidification and no processing, that is the classic environment for Clostridium botulinum.
- Why it fails: no sterilisation or processing stepThe recipe says only "bottle," with no mention of sterilised bottles, headspace, seal, boiling-water bath or storage temperature. Three hours of open boiling kills vegetative organisms but not botulinum spores, which survive comfortably and germinate in an anaerobic jar. Any modern tomato ketchup for keeping should be made from a current tested recipe with specified added acid and processing time.
- Bushel and gill measuresBushel measure -- A bushel of tomatoes is a dry measure of volume, about 50-53 lb by weight. Half a gallon of vinegar is 8 cups. The quantities require a preserving pan holding several gallons.
- The spicing is aggressiveAn ounce and a half of cayenne, a quarter pound of allspice and two ounces of cloves is a heavy hand even across fifty pounds of fruit, and clove in particular dominates as the sauce reduces. Nineteenth-century ketchup was a condiment used by the spoonful, closer to a spiced vinegar sauce than to the sweet, thick modern product.
- No sugar at allThere is no sugar in this formula. Many nineteenth-century tomato ketchups were sharp and savoury rather than sweet; the pronounced sweetness of modern commercial ketchup is a later development, associated with both taste and preservation.
- "Bottle without straining"The spice solids are left in the bottle rather than strained out, so the sauce continues to infuse and can grow hotter and more clove-forward as it stands.
Ketchup began as a preserved brine, not a tomato product: the word is generally traced to the Hokkien kê-tsiap, a fermented fish sauce encountered by English traders in Southeast Asia, and the earliest British ketchups were made from mushrooms, walnuts, oysters or anchovies. Tomato versions appear in English and American cookery from the early nineteenth century onward, though mushroom ketchup remained current alongside them. What survives here is the older logic: a dark, thin, heavily spiced vinegar sauce made in bulk at the height of the glut, bottled for the year, and used a spoonful at a time to lift plain meat. The bushel quantity is a reminder that this was a seasonal household task on the scale of jam-making, not a small-batch condiment.