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Wolfram Ketchup
Into two gallons of very stale ale--the stronger the better--put a pound and a half of anchovies washed and cleansed from the entrails, half an ounce of mace, the same quantity of cloves, a quarter of an ounce of allspice, the same quantity of long pepper, four chillies, half a dozen lumps of ginger, a pound of shallots, six lumps of sugar, and two quarts and a half of large mushrooms well rubbed and picked. Boil all these slowly in a well-tinned stewpan for an hour, then run the liquor through a jelly-bag. Let it stand until cold, then bottle it, cork the bottles well, tie a bit of bladder over each cork, and cover the bladder with sealing-wax. This is the most delicious of fish sauces, and one table-spoonful of it will suffice for a pint of melted butter. This ketchup will keep good more than twenty years.
A Victorian store sauce of the anchovy-and-mushroom type, meant to be bottled and kept for years at room temperature. The vocabulary is worth decoding even though the method is not one to follow.
- Why it fails todayMushrooms, shallots and ale are all low-acid, and the finished liquor is strained, bottled cold and sealed airtight with bladder and wax. That is an anaerobic, low-acid, room-temperature package with no measured salt, no acidification and no processing step — precisely the conditions in which Clostridium botulinum spores, which survive an hour of gentle boiling, can germinate and produce toxin. The claim that it keeps twenty years is exactly the problem. Use a current recipe for mushroom or anchovy ketchup, one with tested salt levels, acidification and refrigeration.
- Melted butterIn a nineteenth-century book this is not butter that has been melted but the standard English flour-and-butter sauce. A tablespoon of ketchup to a pint of it was the intended dosage.
- Long pepperPiper longum, a hotter, sweeter relative of black pepper sold in small catkin-like spikes. It had largely dropped out of English cooking by the twentieth century and now turns up mainly in Indian and Indonesian spice shops.
- Stale aleNot spoiled beer but ale deliberately kept, matured and often somewhat sour, and in this recipe probably the main source of what little acidity there is. Modern bottled ale is a different product entirely.
- Well-tinned stewpanCopper pans were lined with tin, and cooks were warned to check the lining before putting anything acid or salty in them. The instruction is a reminder that bare copper and sharp or salty liquids do not mix; stainless steel is the modern equivalent.
- Jelly-bag and bladderA jelly-bag is a close-woven conical straining cloth. A bit of bladder, softened in water and tied over the cork, shrank as it dried into an airtight cap — the standard domestic seal before screw caps.
- QuantitiesTwo gallons is about 9 litres, two and a half quarts of mushrooms is a volume measure of roughly 2.8 litres of whole caps, and six lumps of sugar are cane sugar lumps cut from a loaf, of uncertain size. Nothing in the original tells you the yield.
Ketchup in this book means a thin, dark, salty keeping-sauce rather than anything tomato-based: the word is generally traced to a Hokkien term for a fermented fish brine, kê-tsiap, which English traders met in Southeast Asia in the seventeenth century and reproduced at home with the materials available — walnuts, mushrooms, oysters, anchovies. Cassell's carries a whole run of them, and this one belongs to the anchovy branch, closely related to the commercial fish sauces of the period such as Harvey's and the various "essences" sold by grocers. No source identifies the Wolfram here. The twenty-year keeping claim says more about Victorian storeroom optimism than about food safety.