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Watermelon Catsup
Use the red and a little of the white portions, cooking down pulp and seeds till soft, when press through a colander and add spice, etc., as for grape catsup.
A skeleton recipe that assumes you have already read the grape catsup on the preceding page. The work is almost entirely evaporation, and that is where the attention needs to go.
- The hinge: reductionWatermelon flesh is over 90 percent water, so the pulp must be cooked down for hours before it will thicken into anything resembling catsup. Keep the heat low once it starts to concentrate and stir the bottom often, since the sugars scorch readily in the last stage.
- Yield is very smallThe water has to go somewhere, so expect only a small jar of finished catsup from a whole melon. Plan on a large, wide pan rather than a deep pot; surface area is what shortens the cooking.
- "A little of the white"The pale inner rind holds more body than the red flesh, which is why it is worth including a band of it. Leave out the hard green skin, which is bitter and will not break down.
- "Spice, etc., as for grape catsup"Period grape catsups generally combine vinegar, sugar, and warm spices such as cinnamon, cloves and allspice with a little salt, but the proportions vary a great deal from book to book. The original gives no quantities here, so work from the grape recipe you have and taste as it reduces.
- When to add the vinegarReduce the pulp most of the way before the vinegar goes in. Long boiling drives off the sharpness and you end up adding more than you meant to.
- StorageThere is no processing instruction in the original and no measured acid, so treat this as a refrigerator condiment and use it within a few weeks. Do not water-bath or pressure can it without following a current tested recipe for fruit catsups.
In nineteenth-century American cookbooks "catsup" meant any strained, spiced, vinegared sauce kept in bottles for the table: mushroom and walnut catsups came over from England, and tomato, grape, currant, gooseberry and cucumber versions followed in the domestic manuals. Their purpose was less preservation than seasoning, a bottled sharpness to put beside cold meat in a kitchen with no commercial condiment shelf. Watermelon catsup belongs to the same thrift as watermelon rind pickle, which appears in many books of the period: a melon patch produces more fruit than a household can eat fresh, and boiling the flesh down with sugar, vinegar and warm spice turned a glut into something that kept. Its appearance as a one-line variation, pointing back to the grape recipe rather than repeating it, is typical of how these compilations were built.