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Grape Catsup
To each five pints of grapes allow one pound of sugar, a half pint of vinegar, and one-half ounce each of cinnamon, cloves, and mace. Boil sugar and vinegar together fifteen minutes. Heat the pulp and skins meantime; let cool and rub through a colander; add this to the vinegar and sugar, cocking twenty minutes. If too thick reduce.
A spiced grape condiment of the sort every late-Victorian pantry carried, closer to a thin fruit sauce than to modern tomato ketchup. The method depends on a slip-skin grape, and the spice quantities need thought before you commit.
- "Cocking" is a typesetter's slipRead it as cooking: simmer the combined pulp and syrup twenty minutes.
- Use a slip-skin grapeThe instruction to heat "the pulp and skins" and then push everything through a colander assumes Concord, Niagara or another labrusca grape whose skin separates from the flesh. Some period grape recipes have the cook squeeze the pulp from the skins first; heating softens both, and the colander holds back the seeds and skin fragments. Seedless table grapes will work but give a paler, blander sauce.
- Five pints of grapesMeasured whole and stemmed, that is roughly 3.5 to 4.5 lb of fruit, yielding a few cups of finished catsup.
- The spice quantity is the one thing to scale backHalf an ounce each of cinnamon, cloves and mace is about 2 tablespoons of ground cinnamon, 2 tablespoons of ground cloves and about 3 tablespoons of ground mace, since mace is lighter. The original does not say whether ground or whole is meant. Whole spices tied in muslin and fished out suit most modern palates; if you use ground, start with a third of the stated amount and taste.
- Vinegar strengthA half pint is one cup. Period cider vinegar varied in strength and character, where today's bottlings are standardised at about 5 percent; cider vinegar is the right choice for flavour, and if the finished sauce tastes sharp it will mellow as it stands.
- Boiling the sugar and vinegarFifteen minutes at a boil reduces and marries the two; use a nonreactive pan, stainless or enamel only.
- Judging thickness"If too thick reduce" means thin it with a little water or vinegar, not cook it down further. Aim for a sauce that coats a spoon and falls in a sheet; it will thicken again as it cools.
- StorageThe recipe gives no sealing directions, so treat it as a refrigerator condiment: pack into clean jars, cool, and keep chilled for a few weeks. Do not assume the sugar and vinegar make it shelf-stable; for pantry storage follow a current tested waterbath canning procedure.
- ServingServe it with cold meat, ham, game and roast fowl; it holds up well against a sharp cheese.
Before ketchup meant tomatoes, it meant almost any thin spiced condiment boiled down and bottled to be spooned over meat: mushroom, walnut, oyster, currant, gooseberry, plum, grape. Grape catsup turns up repeatedly in American household books of the 1880s through the 1910s, and its appearance in a chapter simply headed "The Grape" reflects how much fruit an ordinary household had to deal with at once. A single arbour of Concord, the vigorous American grape generally traced to Ephraim Bull's Massachusetts garden in the late 1840s, would ripen far more than could be eaten fresh, so the crop went into juice, jelly, conserve, and whatever was left into catsup, where the seeds and skins that make Concord awkward at the table were strained out and the sugar, vinegar and heavy spicing did the preserving. The sweet-sour-spiced profile is older still, an inheritance from the vinegar-and-clove sauces of English cookery that accompanied cold joints long before refrigeration made a cold joint a matter of choice.