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Tomato Ketchup
1 pk. ripe tomatoes 1 pt. vinegar 1/3 pt. salt 1 tsp. cayenne pepper 1 tbsp. black pepper 1 onion chopped fine 1 tbsp. dry mustard 1 tbsp. Slade's cloves Wash tomatoes and cut out any bad specks. Boil until soft, putting enough water so they will not burn. Then strain through a sieve, and add the rest of the ingredients and boil three hours slowly. Then bottle.
— Mrs. James E. Choate
This is a turn-of-the-century open-kettle ketchup: cook it down, pour it into bottles, cap it, and trust the long boil to do the rest. That last step is where it fails by modern standards, and no amount of care with the rest of the method fixes it.
- Why it is unsafeThe recipe ends at "then bottle" — no hot-water bath, no processing time, no headspace, no acidification target. Sealed jars of a borderline-acid product held at room temperature are the environment associated with Clostridium botulinum, whose spores survive three hours of simmering at 212F. Use a current tested ketchup recipe from a food-preservation authority instead.
- The acid is not enoughOne pint of vinegar against a peck of tomatoes is roughly 2 cups of acid to 12 or 13 pounds of fruit. Tested recipes now specify added vinegar or bottled lemon juice at a measured ratio precisely because tomatoes alone cannot be relied on to sit below pH 4.6.
- A peckA dry peck is a quarter bushel, about 12 to 13 lb of tomatoes — enough to fill a large stockpot before cooking. The three-hour reduction would take that down to a few pints of finished ketchup.
- One-third pint of saltRoughly two-thirds of a cup by volume. In this recipe it is a preservative as much as a seasoning, which is a fair indication of how much the keeping quality was being asked of the salt and vinegar together.
- Slade's clovesD. & L. Slade Co. of Boston was a spice and extract house; contributors named the brand the way one might write "Bell's seasoning" today. It means ground cloves, and a tablespoon of them is a heavy hand by current taste.
- The sieveStraining after the initial boil, before any seasoning goes in, removes skins and seeds and gives the smooth body expected of bottled ketchup. A food mill does the same work faster than pushing pulp through a wire sieve.
Ketchup in an American church cookbook of this period sits at the tail end of a long drift: the word comes from a Southeast Asian fermented fish sauce, generally traced through Malay kecap and adopted into English in the seventeenth century as a name for any thin, keeping, savory bottled condiment — mushroom, walnut and oyster ketchups all outnumbered the tomato version well into the 1800s. Tomato ketchup won out over the course of the nineteenth century, and by the 1890s commercial bottlers were selling it nationally. To Mrs. Choate this was less a sauce than a putting-up job, done in bulk when the tomatoes came in at once. The fault in it is not carelessness but the state of the art — open-kettle bottling was ordinary in period household practice, and the science that condemned it came later.