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Tomato Catsup
One peck ripe tomatoes, 6 onions, Boil together till done, then put through, colander. Add ½ ounce allspice, ½ ounce cloves, ½ ounce ginger, 1 ounce black pepper, 4 ounces salt, 4 ounces mustard, 1 pound sugar (brown), 1 quart cider vinegar, 2 or 3 red peppers. Boil 1½ hours.
A late-harvest catsup built on volume: a full peck of tomatoes cooked down with vinegar, sugar and a heavy hand of spice. The proportions are sound, but the measurements are by weight in a way modern cooks no longer read at a glance.
- A peck of tomatoesA dry peck is eight quarts, which works out to roughly 12–13 lb of tomatoes. Expect it to fill a large stockpot before it cooks down.
- Spices are weighed, not spoonedThese are avoirdupois ounces of ground spice: ½ oz allspice and ½ oz cloves are each about 2 tablespoons, 1 oz black pepper about 4 tablespoons, 4 oz mustard close to a full cup of dry mustard powder, and 4 oz salt roughly ⅓ to ½ cup depending on crystal size. The pound of brown sugar is about 2¼ cups packed.
- The colander is doing a sieve's workPeriod colanders were commonly punched tin, and cooked pulp was worked through them with a wooden pestle or spoon; how much skin and seed they held back depended on the perforations. Use a food mill or press the cooked pulp through a medium sieve; a modern colander will let everything through.
- Red peppersThese are whole dried hot pods, not sweet bell peppers. Two or three of a cayenne type give warmth rather than real heat across this much tomato; adjust to the chile you actually have.
- The hinge: reduce it far enoughNinety minutes at a real boil is what turns thin tomato water into catsup. Keep it at an active simmer, stir the bottom often once it thickens, and watch for scorching in the last half hour, which will taint the whole batch.
- YieldThe original gives none. Expect somewhere around 3 to 4 pints of finished catsup from a peck of tomatoes, depending on how far you take the reduction.
- StorageNothing here tells you how to keep it; catsups of this period were generally bottled and sealed, but this text gives no instruction. Treat the finished catsup as a refrigerator or freezer condiment. If you want it shelf-stable, follow a current tested canning recipe with a measured acid level rather than adapting this one.
The word travelled a long way before it landed on tomatoes: catsup, ketchup and catchup all descend from a Southeast Asian fermented fish sauce, generally traced to the Hokkien kê-tsiap, which English traders adopted in the seventeenth century as a name for any thin, dark, keeping sauce. English catsups were made from mushrooms, walnuts, oysters and anchovies long before tomatoes entered the picture, and the tomato version became the North American default only over the course of the nineteenth century. A recipe like this one, working through a peck at a time and leaning on vinegar, salt, sugar and mustard, belongs to the household preserving season rather than to daily cooking: it was published by a Canadian flour miller for farm and small-town kitchens that put up the garden all at once in September.