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Cucumber Ketchup
2 tablespoons grated horseradish 2 tablespoons salt 2 cups vinegar 2 tablespoons pepper 1 teaspoon paprika Grate cucumber and onion, add remaining ingredients, boil five minutes, bottle, and seal.
This is a nineteenth-century open-kettle ketchup, and the printed text is missing the two ingredients the name depends on. Read it as a historical document rather than a working procedure.
- The ingredient list is incompleteCucumber and onion appear only in the method, never in the list, so no quantity is given for either. Without knowing the volume of vegetable against the 2 cups of vinegar, the finished acidity is unknowable, and acidity is the only thing keeping a sealed jar of this safe.
- Open-kettle sealing is obsolete"Bottle, and seal" means filling hot jars and closing them with no further processing, relying on the heat of the contents to sterilize the jar and pull a vacuum. Current practice is a measured boiling-water process for high-acid products, because the headspace and jar rim in open-kettle filling routinely stay below temperatures that kill spoilage organisms.
- Five minutes is a cooking time, not a preserving oneA five-minute boil softens the grated vegetable and marries the flavors. It is not a substitute for a timed process in a canner, and the original gives no jar size, no headspace and no storage instruction.
- Cucumbers are low-acid and full of waterGrated cucumber releases a great deal of liquid as it stands, diluting the vinegar further after the jar is sealed. Modern cucumber relishes are salted and drained first, and are formulated against a stated vinegar strength — usually 5 percent acetic acid, which was not standardized when this was written.
- The seasoning is heavier than it looksTwo tablespoons of salt and two of pepper against two cups of vinegar is a strong, sharp, condiment-scale mixture, meant to be spooned out sparingly onto meat rather than eaten by the forkful. The recipe specifies only 'paprika', with no indication of type; at one teaspoon against two cups of vinegar it contributes mainly color.
- If you want to make itUse a current tested recipe for cucumber relish or cucumber ketchup from a reliable preserving source, which will specify vegetable weights, vinegar strength and a processing time.
Ketchup began as a family of thin, keeping sauces rather than a single tomato product, and through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries English and American cookbooks printed mushroom, walnut, oyster, grape and cucumber versions alongside one another — the word is generally traced back through Malay kecap to a Chinese term for a fermented fish brine. Cucumber ketchup belonged to the late-summer glut: a household with more cucumbers than it could pickle whole grated the rest down with onion, vinegar, salt and pepper and bottled the result as a sharp relish for cold meat. Its appearance in the Preserving chapter of Lowney's Cook Book — a promotional volume issued by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company in the early 1900s, and better known for its confectionery — shows how routine home bottling still was in a general American kitchen manual, and how casually the instructions for it were written, decades before tested processing times became standard advice.