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Blackberry Catsup
Cover berries with boiling water; simmer ten minutes; press and strain juice, for each quart adding one-half teaspoon mace, cinnamon, white mustard and pepper.
Reduce to one-fourth quantity, then add strong vinegar till of consistency liked. Bottle and seal while hot.
A spiced fruit ketchup of the type that was standard nineteenth-century pantry stock. The recipe assumes you know what a finished catsup should look like, so the two vague instructions — the reduction and the vinegar — carry all the weight.
- Start with the berriesThe original never says how many. Figure roughly 4 lb of blackberries to yield about a quart of strained juice, and cover them with just enough boiling water to float them; excess water only lengthens the reduction.
- Simmer, then pressTen minutes is enough to burst the fruit and release the juice. Press through a sieve or jelly bag; a fine strain gives a clear, pourable catsup, while a coarse one leaves pulp that thickens the reduction faster.
- White mustardThis means white (yellow) mustard seed, the mild kind. Use it whole and strain it out at the end, or grind it if you want the heat carried through. Mace is the outer sheath of nutmeg, and nutmeg is the nearest substitute, used sparingly.
- Reduce to one-fourthA quart of juice down to one cup. This is the step that makes the catsup, and it takes 45 minutes to over an hour in a wide pan. Use a non-reactive pot; the acid will pick up metal from bare aluminium or cast iron.
- Strong vinegarProbably full-strength cider or malt vinegar, of roughly the same order as modern 5 percent, though period vinegars varied in strength. Add it warm, a few tablespoons at a time, tasting as you go; the recipe leaves the quantity to you. It thins the syrup as much as it sharpens it.
- Bottling and storageHot-filling and sealing was the period's whole method of preservation, and it is not a tested process by current standards. Treat the result as a refrigerated condiment, good for a month or two, or follow a current tested boiling-water-bath procedure for the jars.
- Yield and servingFrom a quart of juice reduced to a cup, expect roughly a cup and a half of finished catsup. It was meant for roast and cold meats -- lamb, pork, game, ham -- not for potatoes.
For most of the nineteenth century "catsup" named a category rather than a product: a strained, spiced, vinegared liquid used to season meat, and mushroom, walnut, oyster, grape and currant versions all sat on the same shelf as the tomato one. Blackberry catsup belongs to the fruit branch of that family, and it is often suggested that such recipes were popular in American household books because blackberries were free for the picking in hedgerows and old fields and arrived in more quantity than any household could eat fresh. The spicing here u ace, cinnamon, mustard, pepper is mixture, and the reduction to a quarter volume concentrates the vinegar's acidity, which does most of the work of keeping the mixture. Jam, jelly, cordial, vinegar and catsup were five different answers to the same glut.