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Lemon Catsup
Mix one tablespoon grated horseradish with the grated rind of four lemons. Add one teaspoon of salt, the juice of the lemons, a dessertspoon each of white mustard seed and celery seed, a few blades of mace, four cloves, and a dash of red pepper. Boil thirty-five minutes, then bottle while hot. In five or six weeks this will be ready to serve with fish.
A tiny-batch savory ketchup of the pre-tomato sort, and the shortest ingredient list here hides two practical problems: there is almost no liquid, and it is asked to boil for over half an hour.
- Yield is very smallFour lemons give roughly 1/2 to 2/3 cup of juice, and thirty-five minutes of boiling reduces that sharply. Expect well under half a cup of finished sauce — enough for a couple of fish dinners, not a pantry shelf.
- The liquid will scorchWith no water or vinegar added, the pan is nearly dry from the start. Use the smallest saucepan you own, keep it covered over the lowest possible heat so it barely simmers, and add water by the spoonful if it threatens to catch. Some period recipes for lemon catsup do include vinegar or water.
- DessertspoonTwo teaspoons, midway between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. It was a real measure in Victorian and Edwardian kitchens, not a loose description.
- Blades of maceWhole pieces of the dried aril that sheathes the nutmeg. A few blades is about 1/4 teaspoon ground mace if you cannot find them whole, though whole blades have the advantage of being easy to fish out.
- HorseradishThis means freshly grated root. Bottled prepared horseradish is packed in vinegar and salt (creamed versions add dairy), which will change both flavor and consistency; if it is all you have, drain it well and use a little more.
- Rind and red pepperGrate only the yellow zest — white pith turns the sauce bitter over five weeks of standing — and use unwaxed or well-scrubbed lemons. "A dash of red pepper" is cayenne, an eighth of a teaspoon or less.
- Strain or don'tThe recipe bottles everything together, so the mustard seed, celery seed and cloves keep infusing during the resting period. Strain after the five or six weeks if you want a pourable sauce rather than a spoonable relish.
- StorageHot-bottling gave this a fighting chance in a cold larder, but no processing time or temperature is specified and the reduced volume makes the salt and acid levels unpredictable. Keep it in the refrigerator for both the resting weeks and afterward, and discard it if the surface shows any mold or fermentation.
Before tomatoes took the word over, "catsup" named a whole family of thin, salty, well-spiced table sauces meant to be shaken over plain food: mushroom, walnut, oyster, anchovy and lemon versions all appear in English and American cookbooks through the nineteenth century. The name is generally traced to a Southeast Asian fermented fish or soy condiment \ Hokkien kê-tsiap and Malay kecap are the usual candidates — carried back to Britain by traders, where cooks reproduced the idea with whatever pungent local ingredient was at hand. In lemon catsup, the combination of horseradish, mustard seed and celery seed is essentially a bottled shortcut to the sharp accompaniments then expected with boiled or fried fish. Its appearance in a book organized by fruit is a reminder that lemons in this period were valued as much for preserving and seasoning as for sweets, and that a cook with four lemons and a spice box could stock her own condiment shelf.