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Guava Catsup
Slice ripe guavas and cover with cold water. Let simmer till soft, then rub through colander and coarse sieve (both). To each four quarts of guava allow four small tablespoons each of salt and ground mustard; one each of pepper, allspice, and celery seed (the latter in a small bag). Simmer slowly in a quart of strong vinegar for four hours.
Stir carefully and frequently to prevent burning. This should cook down thick and smooth. Set aside at the end of four hours and let stand over night. When cool, if too thick add vinegar till of right consistency, then re-heat to boiling point and bottle while hot, sealing tight.
A spiced fruit condiment in the older, broader sense of catsup. The quantities are given by volume of cooked pulp rather than weight of fruit, so measure after sieving, not before.
- Measure the pulp, not the fruit"Four quarts of guava" most likely means four quarts of the strained purée, though the recipe does not say so outright. Ripe guavas lose a good deal of bulk to skin, seeds and stone cells, so noticeably more whole fruit than that will be needed to start.
- Both sieves matterGuava seeds are genuinely hard and the flesh carries gritty stone cells. The colander takes out seeds and skin; the second pass through the coarse sieve is what makes the difference between a smooth sauce and one that feels sandy. Do not skip it.
- "Small tablespoons"Period tablespoon measures were not standardised, and "small" probably indicates a level rather than a heaped spoon. Treat the salt and mustard as a starting point to be tasted and adjusted near the end.
- Strong vinegarRead this as a full-strength vinegar rather than a diluted table one; modern commercial cider or white vinegar at 5 percent acidity is the usual stand-in. Acidity is doing preservative work here as well as seasoning, so do not substitute a low-acid or homemade vinegar of unknown strength.
- The celery seed bagWhole celery seed is bagged so it can be lifted out. The recipe does not say when to remove it; leaving it in for the simmer and lifting it out before the sauce stands is the obvious reading. The ground spices stay in the sauce.
- Overnight restThe standing period lets the spices marry and shows the true set. Cold catsup is always thicker than hot, so judge consistency after it has cooled, exactly as the recipe directs.
- Bottling and storageHot-filling and sealing was the standard method of the day. Current practice for a sauce like this is to fill sterilised jars, leave headspace, and process in a boiling water bath, or simply to refrigerate the finished catsup and use it within a few weeks.
Catsup in this book still carries its older, wider meaning: a thin, strongly spiced, vinegar-sharp sauce for the table, of which mushroom, walnut and oyster versions long predated the tomato one that eventually took the name for itself. Guava (Psidium guajava) is native to tropical America and had become abundant enough in Florida, the Caribbean and Hawaii by the turn of the twentieth century that householders needed ways to use a heavy crop that will not keep. Jelly was one obvious outlet, guava's high pectin making it almost automatic; a catsup was the savoury one, turning the same pulp into something to serve with cold meat. The mustard, allspice and celery seed here are the sort of condiment spicing often associated with the period, applied to a tropical fruit the way an English cook would have applied it to gooseberries or damsons.