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Raspberry Catsup
Use a quart of vinegar to a gallon of berries. Cook longer than for blackberry catsup. Add one-half pound sugar for each quart of juice. Lemon juice may be added if liked. Otherwise proceed as with blackberries.
A skeleton recipe that assumes you have just read the blackberry catsup above it: berries and vinegar cooked down, strained, sweetened, spiced and boiled again to a pourable sauce. What follows fills in the parts the original leaves to the cook's memory.
- The measurements in modern termsA gallon of raspberries is about 4 quarts, roughly 5 to 6 lb of fruit, which will give somewhere near 2 quarts of strained juice. A quart of vinegar is 4 cups, and half a pound of sugar per quart of juice is about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons.
- What "proceed as with blackberries" meansThe blackberry catsup this refers to is not reproduced here, so read that entry first; recipes of this type generally heat the berries with the vinegar until they collapse, strain out seeds and pulp through a sieve or jelly bag, then boil the juice with sugar and spices until thickened. This one is unusable on its own.
- Why raspberries need longerThe original gives no reason. Raspberry juice is thinner than blackberry juice, so more reduction may be wanted to reach a sauce that coats a spoon rather than running off it. Judge by body, not by the clock.
- Vinegar strengthNineteenth-century household vinegar varied; modern cider vinegar at 5 percent acidity is the right substitute. Do not use a mellow low-acid artisan vinegar here, since the acid is doing preservative work as well as flavouring.
- SeedsRaspberry seeds are small and hard and will pass a coarse colander. Press the cooked fruit through a fine sieve or a doubled jelly bag, and resist scrubbing the pulp through, which pushes bitter seed fragments into the finished sauce.
- Lemon juiceThe recipe leaves the lemon optional and does not say why; it adds brightness, and some extra acid with it. A tablespoon or two per quart of juice, stirred in near the end of cooking, keeps its perfume.
- Yield and keepingRoughly 3 to 4 half-pint jars. The original gives no processing directions; refrigerate the filled jars and use within a few weeks, or follow current tested water-bath canning guidance for a high-acid condiment if you want shelf storage.
- How it is usedThis is a thin, sharp table sauce in the mould of tomato or mushroom catsup, not a jam. Sauces of this kind were served with cold meats.
"Catsup" in an American cookbook of this period does not necessarily mean tomato. The word covers a whole family of thin, spiced, vinegar-sharp table sauces, generally traced to the fermented fish condiments English cooks encountered through Southeast Asian trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with mushroom versions developing as an English adaptation, and it attached itself to almost any fruit that could be strained and boiled down: walnut, mushroom, tomato, grape, currant, blackberry, gooseberry. Berry catsups made particular sense in a household economy where a gallon of raspberries might come in at once from a patch or a market glut and had to be dealt with the same day. The vinegar and sugar did the preserving, and the result kept in a cupboard through the winter to cut the richness of cold meat. The clipped, cross-referencing style here, sending the reader back to the blackberry entry rather than repeating five lines, is typical of berry chapters in books of this kind, where a dozen fruits are run through the same handful of methods.