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Tomato Mustard
One peck of ripe tomatoes, boiled with two onions, six red peppers, four cloves of garlic, for one hour; then add a half pint or half pound of salt, three tablespoons black pepper, half ounce each ginger, allspice, mace, cloves; boil again for one hour longer, and when cold add one pint of vinegar and a quarter pound of mustard; and if you like it very hot, a tablespoonful of cayenne.
This is a thick, keeping sauce in the ketchup family, closer to a spiced tomato relish than to jarred mustard. The quantities are enormous by modern standards and the salt is doing preservative work, so scale before you commit a whole afternoon.
- A peck of tomatoesA peck is a quarter bushel, roughly 12-14 lb of tomatoes. Quartered into the pot, that reduces over two hours of boiling to something like 3 to 4 quarts of finished sauce. Halving or quartering the recipe is sensible for a household.
- "Half pint or half pound of salt"The two are treated as equivalent on the old kitchen rule that a pint of salt weighs about a pound; fine salt in fact runs somewhat heavier than that. Half a pound is roughly a cup. This is a preserving quantity, not a seasoning quantity, and the result is meant to be used by the spoonful.
- Six red peppersAmbiguous in the original. "Red peppers" in books of this period may well mean dried red chile pods a few inches long rather than sweet bell peppers, but the recipe does not say. Six dried cayenne pods would give a moderate heat; the optional tablespoon of cayenne at the end makes it fierce.
- The spicesHalf an ounce each of ginger, allspice, mace and cloves is about two tablespoons of each ground. Buy ground rather than whole here, since nothing is strained out unless you choose to strain it, and whole cloves in a table sauce are unpleasant.
- The mustardA quarter pound of dry mustard powder, about a cup, stirred in cold. Prepared jarred mustard is not the intent and will thin the sauce. Heat drives off mustard's pungency, which may be why it and the vinegar go in only after the pot has cooled.
- TextureNothing here removes skins or seeds. If you want a smooth sauce, push the cooked tomato mixture through a sieve or food mill after the first hour of boiling, before the spices go in.
- Keeping itWith no sealing, processing or acidity measurement given, treat the finished sauce as a refrigerator condiment in clean jars and use it within a few weeks, or freeze it in portions. Do not store it at room temperature on the strength of the salt alone.
- Yield and useExpect three to four quarts from a full batch. It is a table sauce for cold meat, chops and sausage, used like a sharp ketchup rather than spread like mustard.
Nineteenth-century American cookbooks used "mustard" loosely for any sharp condiment carrying mustard flour, and tomato mustard sits alongside the tomato catsups, chili sauces and pepper vinegars that filled the sauce chapters of the period. All of them come out of the same late-summer problem: a glut of ripe tomatoes, solved with the standard preserving trio of salt, vinegar and heavy spicing. The spice list here — ginger, allspice, mace, cloves — draws on the imported-spice cupboard of a comfortable household.