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Tomato Honey (Pepper two red peppers two)
pepper, two red peppers, two roots of celery chopped fine, two teaspoonfuls of celery seed, one cup of nasturtiums chopped fine, one cup of brown sugar, two tablespoonfuls of ground cloves, two tablespoonfuls of ground allspice, one teaspoonful of cinnamon, one teaspoonful of ground mace, add one quart of cider vinegar. Mix all well together, bottle and seal. The cold tomato catsup will keep one or two years perfectly sweet, and is a very nice accompaniment to cold meats or boiled salt meats.
This is the tail end of a cold (uncooked) tomato catsup, and the page as printed is both incomplete and unsafe to follow. The notes below explain what is missing and why the method fails modern preserving standards.
- The recipe is a fragmentIt opens mid-sentence, so the tomato quantity and the salt, and probably other ingredients and instructions, are missing. The title, "Tomato Honey," does not match the text, which its own closing line identifies as a cold tomato catsup.
- No cooking at any stageEverything is chopped raw, mixed with vinegar and sugar, and bottled. Nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would destroy spoilage organisms or moulds on the raw celery root, peppers and nasturtiums.
- "Bottle and seal" is not a processThere is no boiling-water bath, no headspace, no jar or lid specification and no processing time. A cold-packed, unprocessed jar held at room temperature for the promised "one or two years" is a spoilage risk, not a preserve.
- Acidity is unmeasuredOne quart of cider vinegar sounds generous, but with the tomato weight missing there is no way to know the finished acidity, and 19th-century cider vinegar was not standardised at 5 percent as bottled vinegar is now. Safe uncooked relishes depend on a known acid-to-vegetable ratio, which this cannot give.
- Celery root and garden soilCelery and garden soil -- The raw celery and the nasturtiums are garden produce and carry soil organisms, and nothing in the method heats them before they go into a sealed jar.
- If you want the flavourThe spice profile here ca nod to clove, allspice, mace and celery seed cais typical of period tomato catsups, and modern tested recipes for spiced tomato relish or ketchup follow the same lines. Use a current, tested recipe with stated quantities and processing times.
Before ketchup meant a single sweet tomato sauce in a bottle, "catsup" was a whole family of sharp, spiced condiments -- mushroom, walnut, oyster, cucumber -- made at home to cut through cold meat and boiled salt beef, exactly the use the last line of this recipe describes. Tomato versions became common in American household books through the middle of the 19th century, and cold or "raw" catsups, mixed rather than boiled down, also appear in them. The nasturtiums are the period detail worth noticing: the flowers, leaves and especially the green seed pods were used as a homegrown substitute for capers, and their peppery heat did much of the work that chilli does in a modern relish. The confident promise that it "will keep one or two years perfectly sweet" was written before acidity and processing times were understood as they are now.