Home › Cookery › Red Pepper Catsup
Red Pepper Catsup
To four dozen fine ripe bell-peppers add two quarts good vinegar, one quart water, three tablespoonfuls grated horseradish five onions chopped fine. Boil till soft, and rub through a sieve. Then season to your taste with salt, spice, black and white mustard well beaten; after which boil ten minutes. Add celery-seed if liked, and a pod or more strong pepper, a little sugar. All should be cut up and the seed boiled with it. Bottle and cork tightly.--Mrs.
A vinegar-based pepper sauce of the kind nineteenth-century cooks called catsup: boiled, strained, seasoned to taste, and bottled. The original leaves nearly every quantity to judgment, so the notes below are about scale, texture and keeping.
- Four dozen peppersBell peppers of the period were probably smaller than today's blocky supermarket ones; figure roughly 8 to 10 lb of fruit, or about 20 to 24 large modern bells. Red-ripe is specified; green peppers give a grassier, duller sauce.
- YieldThree quarts of liquid plus the pepper pulp will lose volume during the first boil and again at the sieve; expect somewhere in the region of 2 to 3 quarts of finished catsup depending on how hard you boil. Halve or quarter the whole thing unless you want a great deal of it.
- "Spice" and "well beaten"Spice here means whole warm spices — allspice, cloves, a stick of cinnamon. "Well beaten" means crushed or ground, which the mortar did and a spice grinder does. Black and white mustard seed are the two ordinary mustards; a mix of brown and yellow seed, ground, is the equivalent.
- Season to taste, in numbersFor 2 quarts of strained purée, start with 1 tablespoon salt, 2 teaspoons ground mustard, 1 teaspoon total warm spice and 1 to 2 tablespoons sugar, then adjust. Salt and vinegar both read stronger once the sauce cools.
- Rubbing through a sieveCook the peppers, onions and horseradish until fully collapsed — 30 to 45 minutes at a bare simmer — then run everything through a food mill or blend and press through a mesh strainer. The skins and seeds are what you are removing; blending alone leaves the sauce gritty.
- A pod or more strong pepper"Strong pepper" is a hot pepper — cayenne or a similar long red chile. One dried pod in 2 quarts gives background warmth rather than heat; the closing line, "the seed boiled with it," suggests boiling it in rather than stirring it in at the end, though the text is ambiguous.
- The second boilTen minutes after seasoning is enough to marry the spices and no more. Longer dulls the fresh vinegar edge and darkens the color from bright red to brick.
- Keeping itCorking tightly was the only option available; it is not adequate now. Treat this as a refrigerator condiment — it will hold well over a month cold — and if you want it shelf-stable, follow a current tested pepper-sauce canning procedure rather than the instruction here, since peppers and onions are low-acid and the vinegar here is diluted with half its volume again in water (two quarts vinegar to one of water).
In the nineteenth century "catsup" (or catchup, or ketchup) named a whole family of thin, strained, keeping sauces rather than one tomato product: mushroom, walnut, oyster and pepper catsups all appear in American and British cookbooks of the period, and the name is generally traced to the salty fish brines of Southeast Asia, though the route by which it reached English is reconstructed and still disputed. Their purpose was to season through the winter, which explains the vinegar, the salt and the mustard here — all preservatives as much as flavorings. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1877, gathered its contents from a network of Virginia housekeepers, and the truncated "--Mrs." at the end is most likely a transcription cut-off from one of the named contributors, evidence of a collection assembled from many hands rather than written by one.