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Cold Tomato Catsup
Peel and chop fine a half peck of ripe tomatoes, drain in a colander. Turn into an earthern vessel, add a half cup of grated horse-radish, a half pint of salt, one cup of black and white mustard-seed mixed, two tablespoonfuls of black
This is an uncooked, salt-packed catsup of the kind kept in a crock through the winter, and the text as printed breaks off mid-ingredient. Both facts matter before anything else.
- The recipe is incompleteThe page stops at "two tablespoonfuls of black —" with no vinegar quantity, no sugar or spice list, no standing time and no instruction for potting or keeping. There is no way to judge the acid level of the finished catsup, which is the one thing that governs whether a raw preserve is safe.
- Nothing is ever heatedTomatoes, horseradish and mustard seed are chopped raw and packed into an earthen vessel. There is no cooking step and no boiling-water process, so nothing on the surface of the fruit or in the crock is ever brought to a temperature that kills anything.
- Modern tomatoes are less acidicTomatoes are borderline-acid — Tomato pH straddles 4.6, the line below which acid alone suppresses Clostridium botulinum, and varies with variety and ripeness. Nineteenth-century cold catsups relied on the assumption that tomatoes were reliably acid; current canning guidance requires added citric acid or bottled lemon juice in measured amounts regardless of variety, and this recipe gives none.
- Salt is not a substitute for a processA half pint of salt — one cup — is a heavy dose, but salt inhibits spoilage only at the concentration actually achieved in the liquid, and a watery raw tomato pulp dilutes it unpredictably. Without a measured brine strength this is not a controlled cure.
- Half a peckHalf a peck — For reference when reading the original: half a peck is four dry quarts, roughly 6 to 7 lb of whole tomatoes, and a half pint of salt is one cup. An "earthern vessel" is a stoneware crock, salt and acid being hard on metal.
- Black and white mustard-seedWhite (yellow) mustard seed is the milder Sinapis alba; black is Brassica nigra, sharper and now largely replaced in commerce by brown mustard seed. Both are still sold, but the pungency of a modern mixture will not match the original.
- If you want a cold catsupUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, one that specifies added acid and either refrigeration or a measured process time.
Catsup began as a general word for a thin, keeping sauce — the name is usually traced to a Hokkien term for a fermented fish brine, carried into English by way of Southeast Asian trade — and only settled onto tomatoes over the course of the nineteenth century. Before then a household catsup might be walnut, mushroom, oyster or cucumber, and the tomato version competed with all of them. "Cold" catsups like this one are really a species of chopped pickle or chow-chow: the fruit is never cooked down, so the sauce keeps its raw bite and the horseradish and mustard seed stay hot rather than mellowing. They belong to a preserving tradition in which a stoneware crock in a cool cellar was the whole technology, and in which the cook judged the keeping by taste and smell rather than by acidity or process time.