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Currant Catsup
To four pounds washed, stemmed currants add two pounds brown sugar and one pint vinegar. Simmer till sufficiently thick when add spice (one teaspoon each cloves, pepper, and cinnamon). Boil five minutes longer; strain and bottle. 6
A high-acid fruit catsup of the sort that once stood on the table beside cold meat. The method is sound; the only real gaps are the finished texture, the strength of the vinegar, and what to do with the bottles afterward.
- What "catsup" means hereNot tomato. In this period catsup meant any thin, spiced, vinegar-sharp table sauce, and this one is closer to a pourable condiment than a jam. Cook it to the consistency of heavy cream, not preserve stiffness, or it will not pour once cold.
- The currantsThe recipe does not say which; red currants are the likely intention. Frozen currants work and need no thawing; they will collapse faster than fresh, so watch the pot early on.
- Vinegar strengthA pint is 2 cups. Use ordinary 5 percent cider or white wine vinegar. Nineteenth-century household vinegar varied, but 5 percent is what the acidity of the finished sauce depends on, so do not substitute a mild or diluted rice vinegar.
- Pepper means black pepperOne teaspoon each of ground cloves, black pepper and cinnamon. Add them at the end, as directed: cloves in particular turn medicinal and flat if simmered for the full reduction.
- Simmering time"Till sufficiently thick" is usually 45 minutes to an hour over a low flame, stirring often once the fruit has broken down. Currants are high in pectin and will catch on the bottom of a thin pan; use a heavy-bottomed pot.
- StrainingPush the hot sauce through a fine sieve or the medium plate of a food mill to leave the seeds and skins behind. It goes through easily while hot and barely at all once cool, so strain immediately after the five-minute boil.
- Bottling and keepingThe recipe says only to bottle, with no sealing or storage method given. Bottle hot into clean jars and refrigerate, where it keeps for months; for shelf storage, process filled jars in a boiling water bath according to current canning directions rather than simply corking them.
- Yield and servingServing -- It is a sauce for cold lamb, ham, roast pork or game, and it holds up well beside a strong cheese.
Before tomato took the word over, catsup was a whole family of sauces named for their function rather than their fruit: thin, keeping, heavily spiced, meant to be shaken out of a bottle onto plain meat. Nineteenth-century American and English cookbooks carry mushroom, walnut, oyster, grape, gooseberry and currant versions, and the vinegar-and-sugar formula here is the standard fruit template, adjusted only in the proportion of sugar to the tartness of the fruit. Currants earned their place in it by being abundant and briefly available: bushes were a fixture of kitchen gardens, the crop ripened all at once, and a household with more currants than it could eat turned them into jelly, into shrub, and into sauces like this one. The genus later fell out of American cultivation for decades because black currants host white pine blister rust, which is much of why the fruit now looks unfamiliar on this side of the Atlantic while a book like this treats it as ordinary.