Home › The Principles of Cookery › Tomato Ketchup
Tomato Ketchup
A small glassful of tomato ketchup stirred into half a pint of melted butter or gravy may be used instead of tomato sauce. Take two quarts of small ripe tomatoes, cut them into slices, lay them in a deep pan, and sprinkle amongst them four ounces of salt. Let them lie for twenty-four hours. Pour the juice from them, and boil it with four ounces of shallots and a dozen and a half small capsicums. Press the tomatoes through a sieve, stir the pulp into the juice, and let it boil half an hour longer. Pour the ketchup whilst it is warm into warm bottles. Cork securely, and seal the corks. Time, two days.
This is a bottled preserve made without vinegar, without a measured acid level, and without any heat processing after filling. That combination is why it cannot be recommended, and the notes below explain the specifics rather than offering a revised method.
- No acid at allMost published ketchup recipes of the period carry vinegar, and that acid is what makes the bottled product safe. This version relies on salt and boiling alone. Ripe tomatoes sit around pH 4.3-4.9 and some varieties fall above the 4.6 threshold, so the finished sauce cannot be assumed to be an acid food.
- Sealed warm, then leftPouring warm sauce into warm bottles, corking and sealing the corks is not a process. Nothing in the method holds the filled, closed container at a temperature that would destroy spores, and the sealed bottle is precisely the oxygen-free environment in which Clostridium botulinum can produce toxin in a low-acid food.
- The salt is for flavour, not preservationFour ounces of salt across two quarts of tomatoes is roughly 6 per cent by weight of the fruit, and because the sieved pulp is stirred back into the juice the salt stays in the sauce; the concentration in the finished, boiled product cannot be worked out from the recipe. It cannot be relied on to preserve a wet, sealed product held at room temperature.
- Twenty-four hours at room temperatureThe sliced tomatoes are left standing in salt for a full day, unrefrigerated, before anything is heated. That step alone is outside current food-safety practice for a preserve intended to keep.
- Capsicums"A dozen and a half small capsicums" means small hot chilli pods rather than the modern sweet pepper; in Victorian English usage capsicum generally indicated the pungent kind. The quantity is not standardised in any way a modern cook could reproduce, since chilli heat varies enormously by variety.
- "A small glassful"The opening line, which is really a serving note rather than part of the method, measures the finished ketchup by the glass -- conventionally something like a wineglass, about two fluid ounces. Half a pint in this book is 10 fl oz imperial, not 8.
- If you want tomato ketchupUse a current tested recipe with a stated vinegar quantity and a water-bath processing time, or make a small batch and keep it in the refrigerator. Do not adapt the timings above.
Ketchup began as a salted, fermented fish condiment from coastal Southeast Asia -- the name is generally traced to a Hokkien term rendered in English as k e-tsiap -- and reached Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a thin, dark, intensely savoury sauce. British cooks reproduced the idea with whatever they had, so the mushroom, walnut and oyster ketchups of Georgian and Victorian cookery books are all siblings of this one, and all of them lean on long salting to draw out and preserve a liquor. Tomato ketchup was a nineteenth-century latecomer to that family, and this entry still shows its ancestry: the tomatoes are salted for a day, the juice is boiled with shallots and chillies, and the result is a pourable seasoning to be stirred into melted butter or gravy rather than a thick sweet relish for the table. The commercial bottled ketchup that displaced these household versions came with raised vinegar and sugar levels, enough to make the product genuinely shelf-stable.