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Tomato Catsup
Take sound, ripe tomatoes, grate them on a coarse grater, then strain through a wire sieve, throwing away the skins and seed. Then put the liquid in a cotton bag and let it drip for twenty-four hours. Take the residuum and thin to the proper consistency with vinegar. Then season it to your taste with garlic, salt, pepper, and spices.--Mrs. A. A.
Tomato Catsup.
One-half bushel tomatoes stewed sufficiently to be strained through a colander; to every gallon of pulp add three quarts strong vinegar, two tablespoonfuls salt, four tablespoonfuls grated horseradish, one pound brown sugar, three large onions chopped fine, one tablespoonful black pepper. Boil till quite thick.--Mrs. C. B.
Cold Tomato Catsup. 1/2 peck ripe tomatoes. 1/2 gallon vinegar. 1 teacup salt. 1 teacup mustard, ground fine. 4 pods red pepper. 3 tablespoonfuls black pepper. A handful celery-seed. 1 cup horseradish.
All of the ingredients must be cut fine, and mixed cold. Put in bottles, cork, and seal tight. It is better kept awhile.--Mrs. P.
Tomato Catsup. 1 gallon pulp of tomatoes. 1 tablespoonful ginger. 2 tablespoonful cloves. 1 tablespoonful black pepper. 2 tablespoonfuls grated horseradish. 2 tablespoonfuls salt. 2/3 gallon vinegar.
Boil all well together, then add three pounds sugar, and boil awhile.--Mrs. M.
Four contributors' catsups, from a strained raw juice to a long-boiled spiced pulp. All four end at the same place — a bottle corked and set aside for months — and that is where they fail by current standards.
- Why the caution appliesNone of these gives any heat processing after bottling, and none controls acidity in a measurable way. Tomatoes sit right at the pH boundary that decides whether a sealed, oxygen-free jar can support Clostridium botulinum, and ripeness, variety and the amount of pulp all move that number. Use a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority if you want catsup for the shelf.
- The cold version is the worst offenderMrs. P.'s catsup is raw tomato, raw aromatics and vinegar mixed cold, bottled, sealed tight, and deliberately aged. Nothing in it is ever brought to temperature, and "it is better kept awhile" is an instruction to hold an unprocessed mash at room temperature.
- The twenty-four-hour dripMrs. A. A. hangs strained raw tomato juice in a cotton bag for a full day, presumably at room temperature. That is a long warm incubation in an open cloth before any vinegar or salt reaches the pulp.
- "Residuum"In Mrs. A. A.'s recipe the residuum appears to be the thick pulp left in the bag after the watery juice has dripped away, though the wording is ambiguous about which part is meant.
- The old dry measuresA bushel of tomatoes is conventionally reckoned at about 53 lb, so Mrs. C. B.'s half bushel is roughly 26 lb of fruit. A peck is a quarter bushel, making Mrs. P.'s half peck about 6-7 lb. A teacup was generally smaller than a modern cup, though the book gives no equivalence.
- Vinegar strength is not knowable here"Strong vinegar" in the 1870s was not standardised, and household cider vinegar ranged widely. Because the acid is the only preservative these recipes rely on, an unknown starting strength makes the whole calculation guesswork.
- What these tasted likeNote the horseradish, mustard, celery seed and cloves across these versions; horseradish appears in three of the four. Nineteenth-century tomato catsup was a thin, sharp, hot table sauce meant to be shaken over meat, not the sweet thick condiment the word now brings to mind — Mrs. M.'s three pounds of sugar to a gallon of pulp is the closest of the four.
"Catsup" reaches English from the Southeast Asian fermented fish sauces generally traced to Hokkien kê-tsiap, and for most of its English life the word meant a thin spiced keeping-sauce made from whatever was abundant — walnuts, mushrooms, oysters, anchovies. Tomatoes joined the list in the early nineteenth century in America and gradually took the name over entirely, so that when Housekeeping in Old Virginia was compiled in the late 1870s a reader seeing "catsup" unqualified might still have wanted to know which kind. The four versions printed here, each credited to a different contributor by initials, show the book's method plainly: Marion Cabell Tyree gathered recipes from Virginia households rather than standardising them, so the reader gets a raw drip-strained paste, a long-boiled sweet pulp and an uncooked cold-mixed relish side by side and is left to choose. All of them rely on vinegar-and-spice preservation, one of the tomato-keeping techniques a household turned to, and the horseradish and mustard that seem eccentric now were part of that defensive seasoning as much as a matter of taste.