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Cucumber Catsup
Pare and grate the cucumbers. To one quart of cucumbers add three large onions grated, one teaspoonful salt, one teaspoonful pepper, and as much vinegar as cucumbers. Exclude the air.--Mrs. S. T.
Cucumber Catsup.
Grate three cucumbers; one onion, one pint of vinegar, one tablespoonful black pepper, one tablespoonful salt, one teaspoonful pounded celery-seed. Put the catsup in bottles, with large mouths; as the cucumber settles, and is hard to get out.--Mrs. H. T.
Cucumber Catsup.
Chop three dozen large cucumbers and eight white onions, fine as possible, or grate them. Sprinkle over them three-fourths of a pint of salt, one-half teacup ground pepper; before seasoning, drain off all the water through a sieve; mix well with good vinegar, and bottle.--Mrs. P. W. Cucumber Catsup.
One dozen cucumbers, four large onions, four tablespoonfuls salt, four teaspoonfuls black pepper, one quart strong vinegar. Grate onions and cucumbers.--Mrs. H. D.
All four of these are raw, unheated vegetable pastes sealed into bottles and kept at room temperature. That method is the reason the page cannot be followed today, and the differences between the four versions show how little agreement there was about the one thing that keeps such a mixture safe.
- The hinge: no heat, no measured acidGrated cucumber and onion are low-acid vegetables, and nothing here is cooked or processed. Sealed into a bottle to "exclude the air," an under-acidified vegetable purée at room temperature is the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum, which grows without oxygen and produces a toxin you cannot see, smell or taste.
- Onions and soil organismsOnions and cucumbers carry soil, and soil is where botulinum spores live. Grating drives that contamination through the whole batch rather than leaving it on the surface, and no step in any of the four versions destroys it.
- Vinegar strength is unknowable"As much vinegar as cucumbers," "good vinegar" and "strong vinegar" name no strength or type; household vinegar of the period, whether homemade or bought, had no fixed acidity. Modern preserving depends on a known acidity (5 percent) and a known ratio; none of that can be reconstructed from these instructions.
- The four versions do not agreeMrs. S. T. uses equal parts vinegar and cucumber; Mrs. P. W. uses three dozen cucumbers and does not say how much vinegar at all. Salt runs from one teaspoonful to three-fourths of a pint. That spread is not stylistic variation, it is the difference between a heavily preserved condiment and a spoilage risk.
- Draining changes the arithmeticMrs. P. W. adds salt and pepper and directs that the water be drained off through a sieve before seasoning. Removing an unmeasured volume of liquid from an unmeasured batch makes the final acid concentration impossible to calculate even in principle.
- Wide-mouth bottlesMrs. H. T.'s note about wide mouths is sound observation — grated cucumber settles into a dense plug — but a bottle that is repeatedly opened, dipped into and reclosed over weeks adds a second contamination route to an already unsafe preserve.
- If you want cucumber catsupUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, which will specify vinegar strength, a heat process and a storage method. Do not adapt the proportions above.
In nineteenth-century American kitchens "catsup" meant any thin, strongly seasoned bottled sauce, and tomato was only one option among many: mushroom, walnut, oyster, currant and cucumber catsups all appear in household books of the period, used as a spoonful of sharpness stirred into gravies, soups and cold meats. Cucumber catsup belonged to the late-summer glut, when a garden row produced more than could be eaten fresh and vinegar was a cheap way to hold the surplus. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, was first published in 1878 and gathered its contents from a large circle of contributors, which is consistent with four separate versions sitting here one after another, each signed with a set of initials — the book preserves the disagreement rather than resolving it, and the modern reader can watch four households solve the same problem four different ways.