Home › The Principles of Cookery › TOMATO KETCHUP (another way) (Take any quantity of very ripe)
TOMATO KETCHUP (another way) (Take any quantity of very ripe)
Take any quantity of very ripe tomatoes, and cut them into slices. Put a layer into a deep jar, sprinkle a little salt over it, add another layer and a little more salt, and repeat this until the tomatoes are all used. The quantity of salt required will be about two ounces of salt for a quart of tomatoes. Put the jar in a warm place, and stir the fruit every now and then for three days. At the end of that time press the tomatoes through a sieve. Measure the juice, and boil it, with a quarter of an ounce of black pepper, eight cloves, a blade of mace, a tea-spoonful of powdered ginger, and half an ounce of allspice to each quart of juice. Pour it whilst warm into warm bottles, and when it is quite cold cork up securely. At the end of three months boil it again, adding fresh spice according to taste. Cork it up again, and store for use. Time to boil the juice with the spice, a quarter of an hour.
This is a room-temperature fermented, uncanned tomato preserve with no vinegar and no measured acidity, intended to be bottled warm and kept for months. It cannot be made safely by modern standards, and the notes below explain where it fails rather than how to fix it.
- No acid at allEvery modern tomato ketchup and every tested tomato canning recipe relies on added vinegar, lemon juice or citric acid to bring the pH reliably below 4.6. This version depends solely on the tomatoes' own acidity, which varies by variety and ripeness and in many modern cultivars sits above that threshold.
- Botulism is the specific riskA sealed, corked bottle of low-acid tomato pulp held at room temperature for months is close to a textbook environment for Clostridium botulinum: anaerobic, moist, unrefrigerated, and not acidic enough to inhibit the organism. Fifteen minutes at a simmer kills vegetative bacteria but not the spores.
- The three-day warm standSliced tomatoes salted at roughly 2 oz per quart and left in a warm place for three days is a deliberate, uncontrolled ferment. Two ounces of salt per quart of sliced fruit is far below a brining concentration that would reliably suppress spoilage organisms, and no temperature or pH is specified at any point.
- Warm bottles, cold corkPouring hot liquid into warm bottles and corking only when cold gives no vacuum seal and no processing of the headspace. A cork is not a hermetic closure; nineteenth-century bottlers often sealed over the cork with wax or resin, which this recipe does not mention.
- Reboiling at three monthsThe instruction to boil the ketchup again after three months and add fresh spice suggests the author expected the bottled sauce to deteriorate. Boiling for about ten minutes does inactivate botulinum toxin, but no boiling time is given here, and reboiling destroys neither the spores nor the conditions that let them grow again; spoilage of this kind cannot be judged by taste or smell.
- Reading the quantitiesThe spicing is given per quart of strained juice: a quarter ounce of black pepper is about a tablespoon of whole peppercorns, half an ounce of allspice about two tablespoons of berries, and a blade of mace is one piece of the lacy covering of a nutmeg, roughly equal to half a teaspoon ground. "Any quantity" means the cook scales everything from the volume of juice obtained.
- If you want tomato ketchupUse a current tested recipe with measured vinegar and either a boiling-water canner or refrigeration. The spice profile here, pepper, clove, mace, ginger and allspice, is the interesting part and transfers readily to a modern method.
Ketchup began as a preserved brine rather than a tomato sauce: the word is generally traced to a Hokkien term for a fermented fish or seafood liquor, carried to England by traders in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and reapplied to any thin, dark, long-keeping bottled seasoning. English kitchens made ketchups of mushrooms, walnuts, oysters and anchovies long before tomatoes, and the salt-and-stand method here echoes those fish and mushroom versions, where the salt drew out the juice and a slow ferment did the flavouring. Tomato ketchup arrived later, and through most of the nineteenth century it remained a home-bottled, spice-heavy, savoury condiment rather than the sweet, thick, vinegar-forward sauce that commercial bottlers standardised toward the century's end. Cassell's prints several versions side by side, as household books did with anything a cook might want to put up in quantity from a glut, and the casual "any quantity" opening tells you this was written for someone facing more ripe tomatoes than the table could use.