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Wild Plum Catsup
To each five pounds of plums take two and one-half pounds sugar cooking, crushing, and putting through sieve. To each quart of juice add a generous half-pint of vinegar and spice to taste. Cook twenty minutes and bottle.
A terse frontier formula that assumes you know what a fruit catsup is meant to look like. The ratios are sound; almost everything else is left to judgment.
- Work in ratios, not batchesThe recipe scales from whatever you picked: 5 lb plums to 2.5 lb sugar, then 1 quart of the sieved pulp to a generous half-pint (about 1 1/4 cups) of vinegar. The recipe states no yield; measure the sieved pulp by the quart and add vinegar and spice to that measure.
- Do not crush the stones"Cooking, crushing, and putting through sieve" means simmering the whole fruit soft, then pressing the flesh through a sieve or food mill and discarding pits and skins. Plum kernels, like apricot and bitter almond, contain amygdalin; leave them intact and strain them out rather than mashing them into the pulp.
- Vinegar strengthUse a standard 5% cider or white wine vinegar. Period household vinegar varied widely, and the acidity here is doing preservative as well as flavor work.
- "Spice to taste"Cinnamon, whole cloves and allspice recur in nineteenth-century fruit catsup recipes, sometimes with a little black pepper, ginger or mace. Roughly a teaspoon each of ground cinnamon and allspice and half a teaspoon of cloves per quart of pulp is a reasonable starting point; whole spices tied in cheesecloth and lifted out keep the color clean.
- Twenty minutes is a minimumCook at a steady low boil, stirring, until it mounds on a spoon and a track drawn across the pan bottom holds for a second. Thin catsup separates in the bottle. Wild plums are high in pectin, so it thickens faster than the tomato version.
- Bottling"Bottle" here means hot into hot jars. The mixture is high in acid and sugar, but the recipe gives no processing step, so treat it as a refrigerator condiment good for a couple of months, or process filled half-pint jars in a boiling-water bath following current tested guidance for fruit catsups.
- ServingThis is a sharp, sweet-sour table sauce, not a jam. It belongs beside roast pork, game, duck or cold meat, and it holds up to a cheese board.
Before catsup meant tomato, it meant almost anything: the word came into English from a Southeast Asian fermented fish sauce, generally traced to Hokkien kê-tsiap, and by the nineteenth century American and British households were bottling mushroom, walnut, oyster, grape, currant and plum versions as keeping sauces for the meat course. The wild plum here is most likely Prunus americana or a near relative, a thicket-forming native fruit that grew along fencerows and creek bottoms across the Midwest and plains, too small, tart and stone-heavy to eat out of hand but abundant and free. Recipes like this one belong to the preserving economy of a household with more fruit than time: gather what the season gives, boil it down with sugar and vinegar, and put it in bottles to carry the flavor of August into winter dinners.