Home › Village Receipts › Catsup
Catsup
One peck ripe tomatoes, four red peppers, six onions, one pint vinegar, two cups sugar, one tablespoon allspice, one-half teaspoon cloves, half a nutmeg, salt to taste, two tablespoons celery seed tied in a bag; boil until it thickens.
— Mrs. Van Allen
A straightforward late-nineteenth-century tomato catsup: fruit, aromatics, vinegar, sugar and whole spice, cooked down until it coats a spoon. The only real work is the reduction, and the only real risk is scorching the bottom.
- A peck of tomatoesA peck is 8 dry quarts, which for tomatoes works out to roughly 12-13 lb. Expect the batch to reduce to about 3-4 pints of finished catsup after several hours.
- The red peppers"Four red peppers" in a village receipt of this date almost certainly means fresh ripe pod peppers, and they may have been hot or merely sweet. Judge by how much heat you want: four hot red chiles in a 12 lb batch is assertive but not fierce; four sweet red peppers give colour and body only.
- Skins and seedsThe recipe assumes you know the routine. Quarter and cook the tomatoes until slack, then press through a sieve or food mill before adding anything else, so the catsup is smooth. Peppers and onions can go through with them or be chopped fine and left in.
- Boil until it thickensThis is the hinge, and it takes far longer than most people expect: two to four hours of steady, uncovered simmering to lose half the volume or more. Use the widest heavy pan you have and stir the bottom often, because as it thickens the sugar will catch and a scorched batch tastes of nothing else.
- The spice bagOnly the celery seed is specified as bagged, but tie the allspice, cloves and cracked nutmeg in with it if you are using whole spice, and pull the bag out once the flavour is where you want it. Ground spice added early goes muddy and gritty over a long boil.
- Salt to tasteSeason only near the end, after the reduction has concentrated everything. Somewhere around 1 to 2 tablespoons of salt suits a batch this size, added a little at a time.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold vinegar of the period was variable; use ordinary 5% cider or white vinegar. Add it in the last half hour if you want a brighter finish, since a long boil drives off much of the sharpness.
- Keeping itThe receipt says nothing about bottling. Treat this as a refrigerator condiment, good for a few weeks, or freeze it. If you want shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested tomato-catsup canning procedure with measured acidity and processing times rather than this text.
Catsup began life as a family of thin, salty, keeping sauces — the word is generally traced to a Southeast Asian fermented fish brine, reaching English as ketchup or catchup in the late seventeenth century — and English cooks made it for a century from mushrooms, walnuts, oysters and anchovies before tomatoes took over the name in America in the early 1800s. By the time a village committee was collecting receipts from its neighbours, tomato catsup was a fixture of the late-summer kitchen: it used up the glut, it survived the winter, and households had their own balance of sugar, vinegar and spice, which is one reason a book like this prints it over a contributor's name. Note what is absent — no starch, no benzoate, no commercial pectin. The thickness comes only from hours of boiling, and the keeping quality from vinegar, sugar and salt.