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Grape Catchup
4 pounds grapes 2 pounds sugar 1 pint vinegar 2 teaspoons cloves 2 teaspoons allspice 2 tablespoons cinnamon Wash the grapes and remove them from the stems. Place them in a pan and steam them without water, until they are soft. Put the fruit through a sieve, add the other ingredients, and simmer the mixture for twenty minutes. Seal it in clean, hot jars.
A fruit catchup in the older sense: a thin, spiced, sweet-sour sauce for cold meat and game rather than anything tomato-flavored. The recipe is sound, but the sealing method belongs to its era.
- Use slip-skin grapesThis was most likely written for Concords or similar American grapes, which soften quickly and slide out of their skins. Seedless table grapes give a blander, thinner sauce.
- Steaming without waterPut the stemmed grapes in a heavy pan over low heat with a lid on; they release enough juice in a few minutes to keep from scorching. Stir once or twice at the start until the bottom layer breaks down, about 10-15 minutes in all.
- SievingA food mill or a wooden spoon against a coarse sieve removes skins and seeds and leaves the pulp. Do not use a blender first, as crushed Concord seeds turn the sauce bitter.
- SpicesThe spoon measures suggest ground spices, though the recipe does not say. Two tablespoons of cinnamon against two teaspoons each of cloves and allspice is a heavy, dessert-leaning balance; halving the cinnamon gives a more usable condiment. If you prefer whole spices, tie them in cloth and fish them out at the end.
- VinegarCider vinegar is the likeliest intention, but household vinegars of the period varied in strength; modern supermarket cider vinegar is standardised at about 5 percent acidity. Wine vinegars vary and will change the sweet-sour balance.
- The twenty minutesTwenty minutes at a simmer is a minimum, not a target. Grape pulp is watery, so cook until the mixture mounds slightly on a cold spoon; thirty to forty minutes is common.
- Sealing"Seal it in clean, hot jars" is open-kettle canning, which current practice has abandoned because the jar contents are not heated after filling. Either process filled jars in a boiling-water bath according to a current canning guide, or skip canning entirely and keep the catchup covered in the refrigerator, where it lasts several weeks.
- YieldExpect roughly three pints. Serve it in small quantities with ham, cold roast pork, poultry or sharp cheese.
Before tomato ketchup crowded out its rivals, "catchup" named a whole family of thin, spiced, boiled-down sauces made from whatever was abundant: mushrooms, walnuts, oysters, currants, plums, grapes. The word appears in English by the end of the seventeenth century and is usually traced to Malay and Chinese fish-sauce condiments encountered by traders, though the details of the borrowing are disputed; for two centuries it meant a keeping sauce for the table rather than a specific flavor. Grape catchup in an American book of this period most likely means Concord grapes, the hardy slip-skin variety that became a farmhouse standby in the Northeast in the later nineteenth century and produced more fruit each September than a household could eat fresh. Its place in the pickles and relishes chapter is a domestic-magazine kind of thrift: sugar, vinegar and a spice shelf turning a glut into something that keeps until winter and dresses up a plate of cold meat.