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Pepper Catsup
50 Pods Large Red Peppers with Seeds 2 Pints of Vinegar 2 Teaspoons of Sugar Cloves, Mace, Spice, Onions and Salt Add a pint of vinegar to peppers and boil until pulp will mash through a sieve; add the second pint of vinegar to the pulp and the other ingredients. Put all in kettle and boil to proper consistency.
A strained, boiled pepper condiment in the older sense of catsup — thin, sharp and vinegar-based rather than sweet. The original leaves the seasoning quantities and the finish entirely to the cook's judgment, so the notes below fill in the numbers.
- What "50 pods" comes toFifty large red pods is roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb of peppers. The book does not say which pepper; "large red" may mean a ripe mild or moderately hot pod rather than a small cayenne, but the recipe does not tell us. Two pints of vinegar to 2 1/2 lb of peppers gives a very sharp sauce.
- "Spice" means allspiceIn this period a recipe that lists "cloves, mace, spice" is generally listing three separate things: cloves, mace, and allspice, "spice" being common shorthand for allspice. Mace is the outer covering (aril) of nutmeg and is usually described as lighter and more floral than the nut itself.
- Quantities for the seasoningsFor this volume, about 1 teaspoon whole cloves, 1 teaspoon blade or ground mace, 1 teaspoon allspice, one medium onion and 1 to 2 teaspoons salt is one reasonable reading of the unquantified list. Whole spices tied in cloth are easier to remove than ground; ground spices will cloud the sauce.
- Non-reactive potTwo pints of vinegar boiled down for the better part of an hour will pit cast iron and pick up a metallic taste from aluminium. Use stainless steel or enamel.
- Handling the peppersGloves, and open a window. Capsaicin goes airborne once a large quantity of pepper pulp starts to boil, and the steam off the kettle will catch in the throat.
- Through the sieveThe first boil in one pint of vinegar takes 20 to 30 minutes, until the flesh collapses. A food mill does the sieving job in a minute or two and holds back the seeds and skins that the original expects you to work out by hand.
- "Proper consistency"Thin enough to pour, thick enough to coat the back of a spoon — figure 30 to 45 minutes of open boiling after the second pint of vinegar goes in. It thickens further as it cools, so stop slightly short.
- Yield and keepingExpect about 1 1/2 pints. The recipe gives no sealing instructions, so treat it as a refrigerator condiment: bottle hot into clean jars, cool, and keep chilled, where the acidity will hold it for several months. If you want shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested pickling recipe rather than improvising a water bath around this one.
Before catsup came to mean tomato and sugar, it meant any thin, strained, boiled and spiced condiment kept in a bottle — mushroom, walnut, oyster and pepper catsups all appear through the nineteenth century, and the word itself is generally traced to a Malay or Hokkien term for a fermented fish or soy brine that English traders adopted in the seventeenth century. A pepper catsup like this one sits between those older bottled sauces and the Louisiana-style pepper sauces that became commercial products in the same era.