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Tomato Store Sauce, Excellent
Cut four pounds of tomatoes into slices, and put them into a saucepan with two large onions sliced, one pound of Demerara sugar, a quarter of a pound of salt, two ounces of peppercorns, half a tea-spoonful of cayenne, half an ounce of cloves, and six ounces of allspice. Pour a pint of vinegar over the ingredients, and let them boil gently for two hours. Stir frequently to keep them from burning. Rub them through a fine sieve, and as soon as the pulp is cold bottle it securely. Store in a cool dry place. Time, two hours.
This is a Victorian "store sauce" — a bottled tomato condiment meant to keep for months at room temperature — and the preserving method is the part that has not aged well. The notes below explain the units and the failure points rather than offering a working version.
- Cold bottling is the fatal stepThe pulp is cooled, then put into bottles and stored at ambient temperature with no hot-fill, no sterilised bottles specified and no water-bath processing. Everything the two-hour boil accomplished is undone during sieving and cooling, when the sauce is handled at room temperature in open vessels.
- The acidity is not knownShelf stability here depends entirely on the finished pH, and the recipe gives no way to know it. A pint of vinegar of unstated strength against four pounds of fruit and a pound of sugar may or may not land the sauce below pH 4.6 — the line below which Clostridium botulinum cannot grow in a sealed anaerobic bottle.
- Modern tomatoes are less acidModern tomatoes cannot be assumed acid enough -- Tomatoes generally sit near the pH 4.6 line rather than safely below it, and some cultivars, as well as very ripe or overripe fruit, can test above it. This is why current guidance calls for added measured acid. Whatever margin of safety this recipe had, if any, cannot be assumed to carry over.
- "Bottle it securely" is not a processThe recipe names no closure at all. Period sealing methods such as a cork, and sometimes a bladder or a film of oil over the surface, are not a hermetic seal and are no substitute for measured heat processing. If you want a keeping tomato sauce, use a current tested recipe with stated acid and processing times.
- Refrigeration is not the answer eitherRefrigeration is not a substitute for a process -- Treating this as a fresh sauce and keeping it cold reduces the risk considerably, but it does not make the recipe as written shelf-stable, because there is still no target acidity and no processed seal. Nothing here justifies storing it at room temperature.
- On the ingredients, for reading purposesDemerara is a coarse, partly refined raw cane sugar; a quarter pound of salt and eight and a half ounces of whole spice to four pounds of tomatoes is a genuinely Victorian ratio, closer to a spiced ketchup base than to anything sold as tomato sauce now. The spices are strained out, which is why the quantity looks extravagant.
A "store sauce" was one made in quantity to be kept in the storecupboard and reached for at table, the household answer to the bottled sauces that dominated Victorian grocers' shelves — Worcestershire, mushroom ketchup, walnut ketchup and their many imitators. The word ketchup is generally traced to a Hokkien or Malay term for a fermented fish brine, and the earliest English ketchups were liquors of mushroom, walnut, anchovy and oyster rather than tomato; tomatoes took over the name during the nineteenth century, as the fruit became cheap and familiar enough to buy by the pound. The heavy hand with sugar, salt, vinegar and whole spice in recipes like this one is not simply Victorian taste: those four things were the preserving system, and the cook was building a sauce hostile enough to survive a cork and a cool larder through the winter.