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Spiced Currants
5 Pounds Currants 2 Pounds Sugar 1 Pint of Vinegar 1 Peck of Tomatoes Pint of Vinegar Ounce Red Pepper Ounce Black Pepper Ounce each, Mace, Cloves and Allspice 2 Ounces Mustard Cut tomatoes in two and boil for half an hour, press through a hair sieve, add spices and boil for three hours over a slow fire. Remove from fire, turn it out and let stand till next day; add the vinegar. Salt to suit; put in a little ginger and essence of celery if desired. Bottle, seal the corks and keep in a dark, cool place.
This entry is a printing casualty: the heading and first line belong to a spiced currant preserve, while the method that follows is a tomato catsup. Beyond the confusion, the preserving procedure is one that current guidance rules out.
- Why it is unsafeThe cooked purée is taken off the heat, left to stand overnight at room temperature, then bottled cold and sealed with corks. Nothing after the boiling stage kills what grows during that pause, and a corked bottle of low-acid tomato held in a dark cupboard is a setting in which Clostridium botulinum can grow. Use a current tested catsup or tomato-preserving recipe instead.
- The acid is not measuredOne pint of vinegar to a peck of tomatoes, with the vinegar added after cooking rather than before, gives no reliable finished pH. Safe tomato preserving depends on a known acid level in a known volume; "salt to suit" and a splash of vinegar do not provide it.
- A peckA dry peck is a quarter bushel, roughly 12 to 13 lb of tomatoes as sold. The yield after three hours of reduction would be a few quarts at most.
- The stray first line"5 Pounds Currants, 2 Pounds Sugar, 1 Pint of Vinegar" is the ingredient list of a separate spiced currant recipe that has been set above the wrong method. No currants appear in the instructions.
- Ambiguous spice weightsThe spice quantities read "Ounce Red Pepper," "Ounce Black Pepper," "Ounce each, Mace, Cloves and Allspice" — a numeral appears to have dropped out of the setting, and it may well have been a fraction. Treat the numbers as lost rather than guessing.
- Hair sieveA sieve of woven horsehair, used to strain skins and seeds without the metallic taint that iron mesh gave acidic fruit. A stainless food mill or fine strainer does the same job now.
- Essence of celeryA concentrated celery-seed flavouring sold by grocers and druggists of the period. Celery seed itself is the surviving equivalent.
Tomato catsup of this kind — spiced, strained, cooked down for hours and bottled rather than jarred — was the standard American preserved condiment of the nineteenth century, long before commercial bottling made it a shelf item. The word catsup and its variants are generally traced to a Southeast Asian fermented fish sauce whose name reached English traders in the seventeenth century, though the derivation is not settled; the English applied it first to walnut and mushroom sauces, and tomato versions begin to appear in the 1810s, though they did not displace the walnut and mushroom kinds until well into the century. The long slow boil here is doing the work that pasteurisation and sealed jars do now, which is precisely where the recipe fails by modern standards. Its appearance in a bride's cook book, under "Pickles," reflects a period when a young household was expected to put up its own condiments by the peck.