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Cucumber Catsup
Pare and remove the seeds from two large, ripe cucumbers, then grate them. Drain this pulp in a colander; there should be enough to measure one pint after all the juice is thoroughly drained away. Turn it into an earthen boiler; add a quarter of a teaspoonful of cayenne, a half pint of cider vinegar, one teaspoonful of salt, two heaping tablespoonfuls of grated horse-radish; bottle and seal. Serve with cold meats.
It is especially nice with cold corned beef.
This is a cold, unprocessed sauce that the original tells you to bottle and seal for keeping, and that is where it fails. The notes below explain the specific problems rather than offering a revised method.
- No heat step at allThe recipe names an "earthen boiler" — a glazed earthenware pot for stovetop use — but never tells you to bring the mixture to a boil, or for how long. Raw grated vegetable goes straight into a sealed bottle, so nothing in the process destroys spoilage organisms or spores.
- Sealed and low-acidCucumber is a low-acid vegetable with very high water content. Half a pint of cider vinegar against a full pint of drained pulp gives no reliable final pH, and household vinegar strength in the period was not standardised the way 5 percent acidity is today. A sealed, unheated, low-acid jar held at room temperature is precisely the condition in which Clostridium botulinum produces toxin.
- Cayenne, salt and horse-radish are not preservativesA quarter teaspoon of cayenne, one teaspoon of salt and two tablespoons of grated horse-radish flavour the sauce but come nowhere near the concentrations that inhibit bacterial growth. Spices were often credited with a keeping power they do not have.
- "Bottle and seal" meant nothing measuredIn period usage this covered anything from a cork and wax to a screw-top jar, with no processing time, no headspace and no temperature. There is no way to reconstruct a safe procedure from the instruction as given.
- If you want cucumber catsupUse a current tested recipe from a food-safety authority, one that specifies acidity and a processing time. Do not attempt to adapt this one.
- Units, for reading the originalAssuming American measure, a pint here is 16 fl oz of drained pulp and a half pint 8 fl oz of vinegar; two large cucumbers, pared and seeded, will not always yield that much, which is why the recipe tells you to check the measure after draining.
Before catsup meant tomato, it meant almost any thin, sharp, spiced bottled sauce poured over plain meat and fish — the word is generally traced to a Malay and Chinese fermented fish sauce, kê-tsiap, adopted into English in the late seventeenth century. Nineteenth-century American and British cookbooks print catsups of walnut, mushroom, oyster, gooseberry, currant and cucumber alongside the tomato version, and the cucumber form belongs to the late-summer glut, when a household with a kitchen garden had far more ripe cucumbers than it could eat fresh. The pairing suggested here — cold corned beef — points to the sauce's real job: enlivening the platter of leftover boiled meat that turned up at supper for days after a large joint was cooked. That such sauces were routinely bottled without any heat processing reflects a period in which the germ theory of spoilage was known but home preserving practice had not yet caught up with it.