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Cranberry Catchup
2½ pounds cranberries
1 tablespoon cinnamon
Vinegar
1 teaspoon ground cloves
2⅔ cups sugar
Wash and pick over the cranberries. Cover them with vinegar and cook until they burst. Force through a sieve. Add the other ingredients, return the mixture to the fire and simmer until thick. Seal in clean, hot jars. Serve as a relish with fowl or meat.
A straightforward boiled fruit ketchup in the nineteenth-century style, thinner and sharper than the tomato kind. The original leaves the vinegar unmeasured, which is the main thing to sort out before you start.
- The vinegar"Cover them with vinegar" is left unmeasured. For 2½ lb of cranberries in a wide pan expect to need somewhere between 2 and 4 cups of cider or white vinegar, added by eye until the berries are just covered. Use 5% acidity vinegar.
- 22/3 cups sugarThis is a typesetting artifact for 2⅔ cups, about 1 lb 3 oz. It is a large amount by modern taste but it is doing preservative work as well as sweetening, so cutting it heavily will give you a looser, more perishable sauce.
- Forcing through a sieveCranberry skins and seeds are stubborn. A food mill with the medium plate does in two minutes what a wire sieve and wooden spoon do in twenty; a blender followed by a sieve also works, though it aerates the puree.
- Cook until they burstEight to ten minutes at a simmer, covered. The berries pop audibly. Do not push past the point where they collapse entirely or the puree scorches on the pan bottom before you get to the sieving stage.
- Simmer until thickExpect 25 to 40 minutes of uncovered simmering after the sugar and spices go in, stirring often as it tightens. It is done when a spoon drawn across the pan leaves a track that closes slowly. Cranberry pectin sets further on cooling, so stop while it is still slightly loose.
- Ground spicesA full tablespoon of cinnamon and a teaspoon of cloves is assertive; ground spices of the period may well have been older and weaker than what you buy now. Start with two-thirds and taste at the end of the simmer.
- Sealing"Seal in clean, hot jars" is open-kettle canning, which modern practice has abandoned because the seal is unreliable. Either refrigerate the finished catchup and use it within a month, or fill hot jars leaving ¼ inch headspace and process in a boiling-water bath for 15 minutes.
- YieldRoughly 3 to 5 cups depending on how far it is reduced, i.e. three to five half-pint jars. Served a spoonful at a time alongside roast poultry, pork or cold ham.
"Catchup" — also catsup, ketchup — meant any thin spiced sauce meant to be kept in a bottle and shaken over meat, and well into the twentieth century American cookbooks printed versions made from mushrooms, walnuts, grapes, gooseberries, currants and cranberries alongside the tomato one that eventually crowded them all out. The word is usually traced to a Hokkien Chinese term for the brine of pickled fish, reaching English by way of Malay kecap, though the details of the route are disputed and by the time this book was printed the connection to fish was long gone. Cranberries were an obvious candidate for the treatment in the northeastern United States: they grow wild in the bogs of New England and New Jersey, they keep for weeks in a cold cellar without processing, and their high acidity and pectin make them behave well in a preserving pan. Butterick was a pattern company publishing for the household market, and a recipe like this would have sat among the pickles and relishes — a sharper, spicier alternative to plain cranberry sauce.