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Peach Catsup
Steam the peaches whole and boil till reduced one-third. To each quart of fruit allow one pound of (loaf) sugar but do not add till juice has been boiled down one-third. Place in little bags (loosely) one teaspoon each of broken mace and whole pepper, two of cinnamon, and half a teaspoon of cloves. Put these on to boil with the vinegar with which the pulp and juice (after cooking down) must be thinned, removing before the fruit and sugar are added.
A late-Victorian fruit catsup: a thin, spiced, sweet-sour peach sauce meant to go beside roast meat rather than on a plate of fries. The original assumes you know what a catsup should look like and leaves the vinegar quantity entirely to you.
- The hinge: sugar goes in lateThe instruction to hold back the sugar until the juice has boiled down by a third is the whole method. Sugar added early raises the boiling point, encourages scorching on the pan bottom, and sets the fruit's colour dark before the water has gone.
- Steaming whole peachesSteam ripe freestones whole until soft, then slip off the skins and pull out the stones before measuring. Never crush or crack the kernels into the pot; peach pits contain amygdalin, and old recipes that call for a few kernels for flavour are not worth copying.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined white cane sugar sold in a hard cone and broken up with nippers, prized because it was cleaner than the brown sugars of the day. Ordinary granulated sugar is its direct equivalent, one pound to about 2 1/4 cups.
- "To each quart of fruit"Most likely a quart of the cooked pulp and juice (4 cups), measured after the reduction, since the sugar is withheld until then; but the original does not say so outright and could be read as a quart of raw fruit. If you take the first reading, measure after reducing, then weigh out the sugar.
- The vinegar is unspecifiedThe original gives no quantity, which is genuinely ambiguous. Cider vinegar suits peaches; add it gradually, tasting, until the sauce pours like a thin ketchup and the sharpness balances the sugar — a cup to a cup and a half per quart of pulp is a plausible starting point, but the recipe leaves it to judgement.
- Spice bagsTie the mace, peppercorns, cinnamon and cloves loosely in cheesecloth so they can swell, simmer them in the vinegar to draw out the flavour, and lift them out before the fruit and sugar go in. Whole pepper means black peppercorns; broken mace is the blade spice cracked, not ground.
- StorageNo sealing or processing is described here at all. Treat it as a refrigerator condiment, good for a few weeks in clean jars, and follow a current tested procedure if you intend to can it for the shelf.
Before the word settled onto the tomato, catsup described a whole family of thin, strongly seasoned bottled sauces — mushroom, walnut, oyster, cucumber, gooseberry, peach — kept on hand to sharpen plain roasted and boiled meats. The name is generally traced to a Southeast Asian fermented fish sauce, Hokkien kê-tsiap by way of Malay; the word is recorded in English by the end of the seventeenth century and was applied thereafter to almost any spiced condiment of the sort. Fruit catsups were common in American household books through the later nineteenth century, when orchard fruit and a well-stocked spice drawer met the era's enthusiasm for putting up everything possible; the mace, cinnamon and clove here belong to the same warm sweet-spice profile Victorian cooks used for mincemeat and pickled fruit, and sauces of this kind were commonly served alongside ham, cold mutton or roast pork.