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English Tomato Catsup
I bushel of ripe tomatoes, 1/2 pound of sugar, I 11/½ ounces of black pepper, 2 ounces ground mustard, 1/2 ounce of ground cloves, ½ teaspoonful of powdered asafœtida, 1½ gallon of vinegar, 1/2 pint of salt, I 1/2 ounces allspice, 1 ounce of ground ginger, 1/2 teaspoonful of cayenne, 1 pint of alcohol.
Put the tomatoes on to boil, cook gently a half hour. Press through a sieve to remove the seeds and skin, return to the kettle and boil down to one and a half gallons. Then add the vinegar and evaporate over the fire to one and three-quarter gallons. Now add the sugar, salt and spices. Stir until thoroughly mixed. Put the asafœtida in a teacup, add two tablespoonfuls of warm water, and stir until thoroughly mixed, then turn it into the kettle and stir continually until the catsup comes to a boiling point. Then take from the fire and add the alcohol. Bottle and seal while hot.
This recipe has been in constant use in my own family for years, and has been pronounced, by those who have tried it, perfect.
A full bushel of tomatoes cooked down over hours to under two gallons of sauce — this is preserving on a farm scale, written for a household that expected to fill several dozen bottles at once. Everything about it scales down cleanly except the boiling time.
- A bushel of tomatoesA bushel is roughly 50-53 lb of tomatoes, which will fill a large stockpot several times over. One-eighth of the recipe — about 6 1/2 lb of tomatoes, 1 oz sugar, 3 cups vinegar, 2 tablespoons salt, a few tablespoons total of the mixed spices, 1/4 cup alcohol — is a manageable batch.
- YieldThe finished quantity is stated: one and three-quarter gallons, or about 28 cups, before the alcohol goes in. That is a season's supply of condiment from a season's surplus tomatoes.
- Expect a long reductionFifty pounds of tomatoes yield close to five gallons of thin pulp; taking that to a gallon and a half means many hours of open boiling. Use the widest pan you have, stir the bottom often once it thickens, and reduce the heat as it does — scorched tomato pulp cannot be rescued.
- Press through a sieveA food mill or the coarse plate of a tomato press does the job of the original sieve quickly, and gives a smoother catsup. Do not use a blender before straining; it pulverises the seeds and can turn the sauce bitter.
- AsafoetidaA resin from a giant fennel relative, sold in Indian groceries as hing, either in lumps or as a yellow powder cut with flour. Powdered hing is much milder than the raw resin, so the recipe's teaspoonful and a half of shop powder is a modest amount for this quantity. Dissolving it in warm water first, as directed, keeps it from clumping.
- The pint of alcoholThis is high-proof drinking spirit used as a preservative, added off the heat so it does not boil away. The recipe itself says only to bottle and seal while hot.
- "Bottle and seal while hot"This is open-kettle bottling, and it is the one step not to copy as written: a hot fill into a capped bottle gives an unreliable seal and no guarantee against spoilage in storage. Treat a small batch as a refrigerator condiment, or follow current water-bath processing directions for an acidified tomato sauce.
- Seasoning at the endSpices go in only after the reduction is finished, so their volatile oils are not boiled off over several hours. Taste once the sugar and salt are dissolved; catsup this concentrated tastes sharper hot than it will cold.
Catsup began as a family of thin, salty, keeping sauces — the word is generally traced to a Southeast Asian fermented fish brine, kê-tsiap or kecap, adopted by English cooks in the eighteenth century for bottled mushroom, walnut and oyster liquors. Tomato catsup was the American branch of the family and did not become the default meaning of the word until the later nineteenth century. This version, called "English," with its heavy hand with black pepper, cloves, ginger and allspice, still belongs to the older tradition: pungent, spirit-fortified, and meant to be shaken out of a bottle in small quantities rather than spread on a plate. The asafoetida and the pint of alcohol both mark it as pre-industrial preserving, from the years before commercial makers leaned on vinegar, sugar and heat processing alone. The closing note that it had been in constant use in the writer's family for years is typical of the cookbooks of the period.