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Vinegar, Pickles, and Pickling: Bottle
Or boil the tomatoes until they are soft. Squeeze them through a fine sieve, and to the juice add 1/4 pint of salt, 1 ounce of Cayenne pepper, a few cloves of garlic or shallots. Mix and boil until reduced one half. Bottle and seal.
Or cut up the tomatoes, place them in a preserving kettle in layers sprinkled with salt, using about 2 teacupfuls of salt to bushel of fruit.
Let stand three or four hours before boiling. Strain and add to the juice horse-radish, onions, or garlic, mus- - : 1 VINEGAR, PICKLES, AND PICKLING tard seed, and mixed spices. Let stand twenty-four hours or more.
Boil down to the right consistency..
Bottle and seal.
Select firm, ripe tomatoes, gash them on two or three sides and place them in a porcelain saucepan. Boil them to a pulp. Rub the pulp through a colander or coarse sieve, and afterwards through a hair or other fine sieve, and for each peck of fruit add 1 ounce of salt, 1 tablespoonful of black pepper, 1 teaspoonful of Cayenne, 1 ounce of mace, 1 ounce of ground cloves, 6 ounces of ground mustard and 1 ounce each of celery seed and mustard seed tied in a cheese-cloth bag. Boil the whole for four or five hours, stirring frequently, especially toward the last. When the catsup is of the right consistency, remove from the fire and let stand overnight to cool. For each peck of fruit stir in 1 pint of pure white wine or cider vinegar. Remove the bag of celery and mustard seed.
Bottle and cork tightly. Store in a cool, dark place.
Or cut the tomatoes in half and boil to a pulp. Press through a coarse, and afterwards a fine sieve, and for each peck of fruit add seasoning as follows: ounce of Cayenne pepper, 1 ounce of black pepper, ounce each of mace, allspice, cloves, 2 ounces of mustard. Salt to taste and add ginger or essence of celery if desired. Boil as above. When cool, stir in 1 pint of vinegar for each peck of fruit. Bottle and seal as above.
Four variant tomato catsups from the same page, written for a household that expected to put up a bushel of tomatoes at a time. The units are the easy part; the sealing is not.
- Why this cannot be made as writtenTomatoes sit right at the borderline of acidity that makes a sealed jar safe, and modern cultivars are often said to be less acid than older ones. Only the last two variants call for vinegar at all, and in those it is stirred in cold after the boiling is finished, at 1 pint per peck of raw fruit rather than measured against the reduced pulp; the first two variants add no acid whatever. In every case the bottles are then corked or sealed with no heat processing. A sealed, low-acid, oxygen-free container held "in a cool, dark place" is the kind of environment in which Clostridium botulinum can produce toxin. Use a current tested recipe with a specified acid addition and a boiling-water-bath time.
- The salt is not a preservative hereThe first variant calls for a pint of salt to an unstated volume of juice, so its concentration cannot be worked out at all; the second uses about two teacupfuls to a bushel of fruit. Neither is measured against the weight of fruit in a way that could be checked, and neither should be relied on to make the product shelf-stable.
- Peck and bushelA peck is eight dry quarts, roughly 12 to 13 lb of tomatoes. A bushel is four pecks, 50 to 55 lb. The recipes are scaled for a garden glut, not a dinner.
- TeacupfulAbout three-quarters of a cup in period usage, smaller than a modern measuring cup and never a precise figure.
- Missing fractionsSeveral quantities in the last variant have lost their numerals in printing: "ounce of Cayenne pepper" and "ounce each of mace, allspice, cloves" carry no figure at all, and may well have begun as fractions. A full ounce of cayenne to a peck would be ferocious, though the preceding variant does specify a full ounce each of mace and cloves. Do not guess at them.
- Porcelain and preserving kettlesThe insistence on a porcelain-lined saucepan is about acid attacking bare iron or copper, which discolours the catsup and gives it a metallic taste. Enamelled cast iron or stainless steel does the same job.
- The four-to-five-hour boilThat is a reduction of raw pulp by evaporation in an open kettle, which is why the instruction to stir frequently "toward the last" matters: once the mass thickens it scorches on the bottom within minutes.
Catsup began as a category rather than a tomato product. The word is generally traced to a Southeast Asian fermented fish brine, ke-tsiap in the Amoy dialect, which English traders brought home as a name for any thin, spiced, long-keeping table sauce; through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries English and American cooks made catsups of walnuts, mushrooms, oysters, and green grapes long before tomatoes dominated. What is telling about this page is that it offers four variants in a row with no ranking among them, and one of them working on a whole bushel of fruit. Catsup was not a shopping decision but an annual chore, made in whatever quantity the garden delivered and seasoned to whatever the household had in the spice drawer. The heavy hand with mustard, mace, and cloves reflects a sauce meant to be used sparingly at the table as a condiment for plain boiled and roast meats, closer in spirit to Worcestershire than to the sweet, thick, tomato-forward product that commercial bottlers standardised in the following decades.