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Tomato Ketchup No. I 24 ripe tomatoes 1/4 cup brown sugar 6 onions peeled 2 tablespoons ginger 6 green peppers 2 tablespoons cinnamon 4 cup salt 2 tablespoons mustard 6 cups vinegar Peel tomatoes, and cook all ingredients six hours, stirring often. Pour into sterilized bottles and seal. 1/2 bushel tomatoes Tomato Ketchup No. 2 2 tablespoons mustard 2 tablespoons ginger 1 tablespoon cloves 1 tablespoon allspice 2 tablespoons pepper 3 quarts vinegar 2 cups alcohol 3 cups brown sugar 1 cup salt 2 lemons finely chopped cayenne pepper Cook tomatoes one hour; press through a sieve; add all ingredients, except alcohol, and cook until thick; boil one minute; add alcohol, and bottle. The cooking will take six or eight hours; stir occasionally to keep from burning.
Two versions of a long-boiled, vinegar-heavy tomato ketchup of the sort every household bottled each September. Neither can be safely put up by the method given, and several of the quantities as printed are unusable.
- Why it fails: open-kettle sealingNo. 1 says only to pour into sterilized bottles and seal; No. 2 says only to bottle. Neither gives a processing time, a water-bath, or a temperature. Tomato products sit close to the acidity boundary for safe unprocessed sealing, and current guidance is to acidify to a measured level and process in a boiling-water bath. The vinegar here may well be sufficient, but nothing in the recipe lets you verify it. Use a current tested ketchup recipe with a measured acidification step and a stated process time instead.
- Missing quantitiesThe tomato line for No. 2 survives only as "bushel tomatoes," with any fraction before it lost, and two measures in No. 1 are garbled (the sugar, and "4 cup salt" for what is presumably a quarter cup). Without a firm tomato weight there is no way to judge the acid-to-pulp ratio, which is the whole safety question in a ketchup.
- The alcohol in No. 2Two cups of spirit stirred in at the very end, after the final boil, served as a preservative and flavour fixative; alcohol appears in a number of nineteenth-century ketchups and sauces, brandy being one common choice. It does not sterilize the batch and cannot be relied on to make an unprocessed bottle safe.
- A bushel of tomatoesA bushel of tomatoes is reckoned at about 53 lb. Since the fraction before "bushel" is lost, the finished volume cannot be calculated from the text, but this is plainly a farm-scale batch made in a preserving kettle over a whole day.
- Six to eight hours of cookingThe long boil is not for safety but for reduction and for driving the ground spices into the pulp. It will also darken the sauce well beyond the bright red now expected.
- Ground spices, not wholeThe tablespoons of ginger, cinnamon, cloves and allspice are ground spice measured by volume. Note that the cinnamon belongs to No. 1, the smaller of the two recipes, where 2 tablespoons in 24 tomatoes makes for a heavily spiced sauce.
Tomato ketchup was the last of the ketchups to take over the name. Through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a catsup or ketchup was a thin, dark, salty seasoning sauce made from mushrooms, walnuts, oysters or anchovies, the word generally traced through Malay kecap to a Chinese fermented fish brine. Tomatoes entered the family in America in the early 1800s and by this period had so thoroughly displaced the others that "ketchup" needed no qualifier. Two competing recipes in one section is a fair picture of the period: bottled commercial ketchup was widely available, but preserving a September glut at home was still ordinary domestic economy, and the alcohol and heavy spicing in the second version are the older sauce tradition showing through, from the days before reliable canning when a preservative other than heat was thought necessary.