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Old Virginia Catchup
1 peck green tomatoes
1 ounce cloves
½ peck white onions
½ cup dry mustard
3 ounces white mustard
¼ cup water seed
1 ounce black pepper
1 ounce allspice
1 ounce celery seed
1 pound brown sugar
Vinegar
Chop the tomatoes and onions, sprinkle with salt, and let stand three hours. Drain well and put the pulp in a preserving-kettle with the other ingredients. Cover with vinegar, and boil slowly for one hour. Seal in clean, hot jars. Less mustard may be used if a less hot catchup is desired.
DOLLAR AND TIME SAVERS COOKING
This is a green tomato ketchup on the scale of a farm household — roughly 30 pounds of vegetables — and it is sealed by the open-kettle method, which is why it cannot be followed as printed.
- Why it fails: unmeasured acidThe vinegar is not measured at all — the pulp is simply "covered." Whether the finished ketchup lands below pH 4.6, the threshold that blocks Clostridium botulinum, is left entirely to chance, and this mix is dominated by onions and unripe tomatoes rather than by acid.
- Why it fails: open-kettle sealingHot product ladled into hot jars and closed with no boiling-water bath was standard practice in 1900 and is no longer accepted. The jar headspace and lid are never brought to temperature, and the seal is unreliable. A current tested recipe with a measured vinegar quantity and a processing time should be used instead.
- Onions are the specific problemAlliums are low-acid, and here they outweigh the tomatoes by half again. Modern tested green tomato relishes specify fixed quantities of onion and vinegar rather than leaving the vinegar to "cover."
- A peckA peck is 8 dry quarts — about 12 pounds of green tomatoes. A peck and a half of onions is something like 18 pounds. The original is written for a cellar shelf, not a refrigerator.
- White mustard seedThree ounces of "white mustard seed" means yellow mustard seed, the mild kind still sold whole for pickling; it is distinct from the half cup of dry mustard powder listed separately.
- Preserving-kettleAn unlined copper or, later, enamelled kettle wide enough to reduce a large volume. Any wide non-reactive pot serves the same purpose — bare cast iron and aluminium will react with the vinegar.
- The salting stepThree hours under salt draws water out so the ketchup thickens without long cooking. It is the sound part of the method, and it survives in modern relish recipes essentially unchanged.
"Catchup," "catsup" and "ketchup" were interchangeable spellings well into the twentieth century, and the word covered a whole family of thin spiced condiments — walnut, mushroom, oyster, cucumber — rather than the sweet red sauce it now names. Green tomato versions belong to the end of the season: they use fruit that will not ripen before frost, which is why they cluster in American household books from the 1870s onward alongside chow-chow and piccalilli. The Virginia attribution is the kind of regional label publishers liked to attach to pickle recipes, signalling a Southern, generously spiced style rather than any documented origin. The closing line, "Dollar and Time Savers," states the book's own premise: this is a way to turn a field's worth of unsaleable fruit into a winter's worth of relish.