Plum Catsup
To four quarts plums (preferably damsons) add one quart water, cooking very slowly till fruit is tender, when press through coarse sieve and return to kettle. Add one pound sugar, one-half teaspoon each of cloves, allspice, and pepper, and one of cinnamon. Cook till thick as wished and bottle while hot.
A spiced fruit sauce in the older sense of catsup, thickened by reduction rather than pectin. Two things need attention before you start: the measurement of the plums, and what to do with the finished bottles.
- Four quarts of plumsFruit here is measured by volume, whole and unpitted. Four quarts of damsons is roughly 5 to 6 lb; a food mill or coarse sieve will separate out the stones and skins after cooking, so there is no need to pit them first.
- Storage is the weak point"Bottle while hot" is open-kettle canning, which current practice has abandoned. The sauce is high-acid and the risk is mould and yeast spoilage rather than botulism, but it is real. Refrigerate the finished catsup and use it within a few weeks, freeze it, or process the jars according to a current tested boiling-water-bath procedure for fruit sauces.
- Slow first cookingThe quart of water is there only to keep the fruit from catching before it releases its own juice. Expect 30 to 45 minutes at a bare simmer, covered, until the skins split and the flesh collapses.
- The spicesGround cloves, allspice and cinnamon; the "pepper" is black pepper, and half a teaspoon in this quantity reads as background warmth rather than heat. Add them with the sugar so they do not scorch during the long reduction.
- SugarOne pound is about 2¼ cups granulated. Damsons are sharp enough to carry it, but taste after the reduction, since the flavour concentrates as the water goes.
- Judging "thick as wished"After sieving, the purée reduces over low heat with frequent stirring, 45 minutes to well over an hour depending on your pan. It should mound briefly on a cold plate without a watery ring spreading from the edge. It thickens further as it cools, so stop a little short.
- No vinegarMany nineteenth-century catsup recipes include vinegar; this one relies entirely on the acidity of the fruit. That makes it sweeter and more jam-like, and is one reason the keeping qualities are poorer than a vinegar-based sauce.
- YieldRoughly 3 to 4 cups, depending on how far you reduce it. Serve with cold roast pork, duck, game or sharp cheese.
Before ketchup meant tomato, it meant a thin, keeping sauce, and cookbooks of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries print recipes for mushroom, walnut, oyster, cucumber, grape and plum versions alongside one another. The word is generally traced to a Southeast Asian fermented fish sauce carried back to England by traders, and the earliest English catsups were correspondingly savoury and salty; the sweet, spiced, sugar-heavy fruit catsups of books like this one are a later domestic branch of the same family. Damsons are specified for good reason: a small, astringent European plum grown widely on farm hedgerows, too sour for eating out of hand but ideal for cheese, gin and sauces, and abundant in late summer, so a household needed several ways to use them at once. The result sits somewhere between a condiment and a preserve, and belongs on the table with cold meat in the same way a chutney does.