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Cherry Catsup
To each pound of cherries allow a pound of sugar, boiling together, then straining. To every quart of the liquor allow a teaspoon each of mace, pepper, ginger, cinnamon, and a half teaspoon of cloves. Boil these with the syrup; strain and add to the crushed fruit passed through a sieve. Boil till thick and reduce with strong vinegar. Bottle while hot.
The instructions run out of order — the fruit is boiled with sugar, strained, the syrup spiced, then recombined with the sieved pulp. Read it through twice before starting, and expect a thick, spiced, sweet-sour condiment rather than anything resembling tomato ketchup.
- Work in this orderPit and weigh the cherries, boil them with an equal weight of sugar until the juice runs freely, then strain out the liquor. Simmer the spices in that liquor, strain again, and stir it back into the pulp you have pushed through a sieve. Reduce, then acidify last.
- Sugar is 1:1 by weightA pound of sugar to a pound of pitted fruit is a preserving ratio, not a seasoning one. It is what makes the catsup keep and thicken, so do not cut it by much.
- A quart of liquorFour cups. Scale the spices proportionally if your fruit yields less — a pound of cherries will not give a quart of juice, so most batches need only a fraction of a teaspoon of each spice.
- The vinegar is unmeasured"Reduce with strong vinegar" gives no quantity, and "strong" was not a standardised term; such vinegars may have been appreciably sharper than ordinary table vinegar. Add it a few tablespoons at a time off the heat, tasting, until the sweetness is cut; roughly a half cup to a quart of finished catsup is a reasonable starting point.
- SpicesGround spices will cloud and grit the syrup even after straining. Whole cinnamon bark, cracked mace, whole cloves, peppercorns and sliced dried ginger, infused in the hot syrup and strained out, will give a clearer result, though the teaspoon measures may equally have meant ground spice.
- CherriesSour cherries (Montmorency, morello) suit this best; the recipe's sugar load assumes tart fruit. With sweet cherries the result is cloying and you will want more vinegar and a squeeze of lemon.
- How thick"Boil till thick" means it mounds on a spoon and a spatula drawn through the pan leaves a track for a second or two. It thickens further on cooling.
- Bottling and storageHot-filling into sterilised bottles was the period method and it relies on sugar and acid alone. Because the vinegar is unmeasured, the finished acidity is unknown — refrigerate the bottles and use within a few weeks, or follow a current tested water-bath process for fruit condiments. Discard anything that shows mould or ferments.
- YieldTwo pounds of pitted cherries with two pounds of sugar gives roughly a pint and a half of finished catsup. Serve it in spoonfuls with roast pork, ham, game or cold mutton.
Before catsup meant tomato, it meant almost any thin, spiced, keeping sauce poured from a bottle: mushroom, walnut, oyster, lemon, gooseberry, grape, cherry. The word itself is generally traced to a Hokkien term (ke-tsiap/koe-chiap), reaching English by way of Malay kecap, and the borrowing is attested in English from the late seventeenth century, when cooks applied it to their own long-keeping condiments. Fruit catsups belonged to the same shelf as spiced fruits and pickled cherries: a way of turning a glut of a highly perishable crop into something that could stand beside cold meat all winter. The heavy hand with mace, cloves and pepper is characteristic, and it is why these sauces read to modern palates less like ketchup than like a loose, sharp chutney.