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Grape Catsup
5 pounds ripe grapes 2 cups vinegar 5 cups sugar 1 teaspoon each ground cinnamon, cloves, allspice, pepper, salt Put stemmed grapes into the preserving kettle with just enough water to prevent burning. Boil to a pulp. Strain, and add other ingredients. Boil until rather thick. Bottle, cork, and seal.
A sweet-sour spiced grape sauce in the ketchup family, closer to a fruit condiment than to anything tomato-based. It is straightforward to make; the only part that needs rethinking is the sealing.
- Grape varietyPeriod recipes of this kind assume slip-skin American grapes, usually Concord, which have the musky flavor and high pectin and acid this sauce depends on. Seedless table grapes give a thin, flat result.
- "Boil to a pulp"Twenty to thirty minutes of gentle simmering with just a splash of water in the bottom of the pan, as the recipe directs, stirring so the fruit does not scorch. The skins should be collapsed and the seeds loose before straining.
- StrainingA food mill or a chinois with a ladle works better than a sieve alone; grape seeds are hard and the skins are tough. Do not push so hard that you force ground skin through, which makes the catsup gritty.
- "Rather thick"Expect 45 minutes to well over an hour of open boiling. It is done when it mounds slightly on a cold spoon and a track drawn across the bottom of the pan closes only slowly. It thickens further on cooling, so stop a little short.
- SpicingA teaspoon each of cinnamon, cloves, allspice and black pepper is assertive by modern taste, particularly the cloves. Add half, taste as it reduces, and adjust; ground spice cannot be removed once in.
- VinegarCider vinegar suits the fruit and was the likely default. Use something at 5 percent acidity rather than a mild wine vinegar, since the acid is doing preservation work as well as flavoring.
- "Bottle, cork, and seal"This means sealing corked bottles with wax or resin, which is not a reliable modern closure. Fill clean half-pint jars with two-piece lids and process in a boiling water bath, or simply refrigerate the finished sauce and use it within a couple of months.
- YieldFive pounds of grapes with five cups of sugar reduces to somewhere around five cups or more, depending how far you take it; the sugar alone accounts for much of the finished volume. Serve it with pork, ham, cold roast poultry or strong cheese.
Before ketchup meant tomato, it meant almost any thin spiced sauce boiled down for keeping: mushroom, walnut, oyster, currant, gooseberry, grape. The word itself is generally traced to a fermented fish sauce of the Far East, variously derived from Hokkien Chinese or Malay, carried into English through Dutch and British trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and by the nineteenth century it had come to mean the sweet-sharp bottled condiment of the American kitchen. Grape catsup belongs to the late-summer arithmetic of a household with vines: a heavy crop, no refrigeration, and jelly already made, so the surplus went into a spiced sauce that would sit on the pantry shelf and dress plain winter meat. Sugar, vinegar and long boiling were the three tools available, and this recipe uses all three at once.