Oyster Ketchup
INGREDIENTS. -Sufficient oysters to fill a pint measure, 1 pint of sherry, 3 oz. of salt, 1 drachm of cayenne, 2 drachms of pounded mace.
Procure the oysters very fresh, and open sufficient to fill a pint measure; save the liquor and scald the oysters in it, with the sherry; strain the oysters and put them in a mortar, with the salt, cayenne and mace; pound the whole until reduced to a pulp, then add it to the liquor in which they were scalded; boil it again 5 minutes and skim well; rub the whole through a sieve, and, when cold, bottle and cork closely.
The corks should be sealed.
SEASONABLE from September to April.
Note. Cider may be substituted for the sherry.
This is a bottled shellfish condiment of a kind that has largely disappeared, and the reason it has disappeared is the reason it should be read rather than made. The notes below explain the units and the failure points.
- The stray first line"1/21 pint of melted butter, made with milk" is a fragment left over from an adjacent recipe and has nothing to do with the ketchup. The recipe proper begins at INGREDIENTS.
- Why not to make itThis is a low-acid seafood pur ed bottles and kept at room temperature for months. Nothing in the method controls for Clostridium botulinum, whose spores survive a five-minute boil and thrive in exactly this environment: sealed, oxygen-poor, low in acid. Sherry at this dilution contributes no meaningful preservative acidity.
- The salt is doing more work than it looksThree ounces of salt is roughly 85 g, and in the finished volume that is a very heavy brine — the recipe is a salt preserve as much as a sauce. But the concentration is unverified and varies with how much liquor the oysters give up, so it cannot be relied on as a control. A current, tested recipe should be used if you want a bottled oyster sauce.
- DrachmAn apothecaries' drachm is one-eighth of an apothecaries' ounce, about 3.9 g. So one drachm of cayenne and two drachms of pounded mace are assertive quantities, but not the point of interest here.
- A pint measure of oystersBeeton means shucked oysters filling an imperial pint (20 fl oz, 570 ml), not a pint by weight and not oysters in shell. That is somewhere in the region of two to three dozen depending on size.
- Seasonable September to AprilThe old rule about months with an R in them. It reflects both spawning season, when oysters are thin and milky, and the absence of refrigeration in warm weather — a shellfish sauce made in July had no chance.
- Sealed corksSealing the cork was the period's substitute for a proper hermetic seal. It excludes air and insects; it does not sterilise, and excluding air is the opposite of what a low-acid preserve needs.
Fish and shellfish ketchups came before the tomato one. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries "ketchup" (from a Southeast Asian word for fermented fish brine, generally traced to Hokkien or Malay by way of English sailors and traders) meant a dark, salty, strongly seasoned liquid used to season sauces, gravies and stews — mushroom, walnut, anchovy and oyster were among the common English kinds. Oyster ketchup made sense in a country where oysters were cheap, abundant and briefly seasonal: a glut could be pounded, salted and bottled to give a savoury depth to winter cooking long after the beds were closed. The decline of the native oyster fisheries in the later nineteenth century, and the arrival of cheap commercial bottled sauces, pushed recipes like this one out of domestic use; Beeton also notes that cider may be substituted for the sherry.