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Tomato Catsup
allspice, four tablespoonfuls of whole mustard, and two tablespoonfuls of salt. Mix, stuff this in the tomatoes, put on the tops, tie them tightly with soft twine. Stand the tomatoes upright in a stone jar, cover with cold vinegar and in one week they are ready for use. A few stuffed peppers or a few hot peppers mixed with the tomatoes greatly improves their flavor. If the vinegar moulds in one or two weeks, drain off, cover with fresh cold vinegar, add two tablespoonfuls of chopped horseradish, which will prevent moulding. TOMATO CATSUP, No. 1.
Cut ripe tomatoes into slices, put in a stone jar a layer of tomatoes and a layer of salt. Stand aside three days. Then press through a sieve, spice and vinegar to taste, bottle and seal.
TOMATO CATSUP, No. 2.
Tomatoes for catsup should be gathered in August, as later in the season they lose their freshness, becoming watery and more acid. Catsup made in September rarely keeps perfectly well.
I bushel of tomatoes, 1/2 pound of sugar, ½ ounces of black pepper, 1 ounce of ginger root, 1½ a gallon of vinegar, ½ pint of salt, 2 ounces of whole mustard, 1/2 ounce of cloves, I 1/2 ounces of allspice.
Use all the spices whole. Put the tomatoes, without peeling, on to boil. Cook gently a half hour. Press through a sieve to remove the seeds and the skins. Add all the spices; return the tomatoes to the kettle and boil down until the catsup reaches the proper consistency. It should be a little too thick, of course, to allow the vinegar. Now add the vinegar, and let stand on the back of the stove slowly cooking another hour. Then add the sugar and salt and about half a teaspoonful of cayenne pepper. Bottle and seal while hot.
Two catsups and the tail of a stuffed-tomato pickle share this page, and none of the three can be put up safely by the method given. The problems are specific.
- No. 1 is sealed without acid measurement or heatSliced raw tomatoes salted for three days, sieved, then "spice and vinegar to taste, bottle and seal" puts an unheated, low-acid vegetable pulp into a sealed anaerobic container with no known final pH. Tomatoes alone sit near the borderline of acidity that controls Clostridium botulinum, and "to taste" gives no way to know whether the vinegar has brought the batch below it. That is the classic setup for botulinum growth, and the toxin gives no smell, taste or gas to warn you.
- "Bottle and seal while hot" is open-kettle canningNo. 2 boils long and hard, but pouring hot sauce into a bottle and closing it does not sterilise the neck, the closure, or the headspace. Open-kettle sealing was abandoned because seals fail silently and moulds and yeasts colonise the surface; those moulds also raise the pH of the food beneath them over time.
- The stuffed tomatoes at the top of the pageVegetables stuffed with dry spice and left a week under cold vinegar in a stone jar are relying on vinegar strength that is never stated, at an unstated room temperature. The recipe itself anticipates that the surface may mould within a week or two, and tells you to drain and re-cover — an instruction that concedes the pack is not reliably stable.
- Vinegar strength is not what it wasNineteenth-century household vinegar varied widely in acetic acid, and modern 5 percent vinegar cannot be substituted by eye into a formula that never specified the original. Any tomato preserve depends on the acid actually present, not on the volume poured.
- Quantity, if you are reading for scaleA bushel of tomatoes is roughly 50 to 53 lb, so No. 2 was written for a household putting up a season's supply in one day.
- If you want tomato catsupUse a current tested recipe with a measured acid addition and a boiling-water process time. The flavour profile here — whole allspice, cloves, ginger root, mustard seed, a long slow reduction — can be read for interest and matched in a modern formula.
Catsup at the turn of the century was still a family of preserves rather than one product: walnut, mushroom, oyster and cucumber catsups all appear in period books, all of them thin, dark, heavily spiced sauces meant to be splashed into gravies and stews. Tomato was the newcomer that eventually took the name outright, and this page catches it mid-transition — the spicing (cloves, allspice, ginger root, whole mustard) belongs to the older mushroom-catsup tradition, while the sugar and the long reduction point toward the thick sweet condiment that commercial bottlers were standardising in the same decades. The note that tomatoes should be gathered in August, and that September catsup "rarely keeps perfectly well," rests on the author's own claim that late-season fruit runs watery and more acid, and it is also a reminder of how much a household relied on judgement rather than measurement. Commercial makers were moving the other way at exactly this time, toward more vinegar, more sugar and a defined process — the very things that made bottled ketchup shelf-stable and made home methods like these obsolete.