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Old Virginia Catsup
Take one peck of green tomatoes; one-half peck of white onions; three ounces of white mustard seed; one ounce each of allspice and cloves; one-half pint of mixed mustard; an ounce of black pepper and celery seed each; and one pound of brown sugar. Chop the tomatoes, and onions, sprinkle with salt, and let stand three hours; drain the water off; put in a preserve kettle with the other ingredients. Cover with vinegar, and set on the fire to boil slowly for one hour.
A green tomato catsup of the chow-chow type — closer to a coarse relish than to the smooth bottled sauce the word suggests today. The quantities are farmhouse scale and want dividing for a modern kitchen.
- A peckA peck is 8 dry quarts, roughly 12–14 lb of green tomatoes; the half peck of onions is about 5–6 lb. Quartering the whole recipe gives a manageable batch of 3–4 lb tomatoes with 1 1/2 lb onions and the spices scaled to match.
- Mixed mustard"Mixed mustard" means prepared mustard paste, not dry powder — a half pint is a cup of it. Any plain yellow or mild brown prepared mustard stands in; skip the whole-grain kinds, since the recipe already carries three ounces of mustard seed.
- The unmeasured salt and vinegarNeither is quantified. For the salting, about 1/2 cup of coarse salt per 12 lb of chopped vegetables draws out plenty of liquid in three hours. "Cover with vinegar" means just enough to submerge — use cider or white vinegar of at least 5% acidity, and at full scale expect to need a couple of quarts or more, depending on how much liquid the vegetables have given up.
- Preserve kettleA wide non-reactive pot: stainless or enamelled. Copper and untinned iron react with vinegar and will both discolour the catsup and pick up a metallic taste. Wide matters more than deep, since an hour of slow boiling is meant to reduce it.
- Whole spicesThe allspice, cloves, black pepper and celery seed would ordinarily be whole here. Left loose they give a speckled sauce and the cloves turn assertive; tie them in a spice bag and lift it out at the end. If you use ground spices, cut them by about a third.
- Slow boilAn hour at a genuine simmer, stirring often — the sugar and the drained-but-still-wet vegetables catch easily on the bottom once the mixture thickens. It is done when a spoon drawn through leaves a track that fills only slowly.
- Yield and keepingThe full recipe makes a very large batch — on the order of two gallons of finished relish, possibly more. The original gives no processing instructions; treat it as a refrigerator relish, packed hot into clean jars and kept cold, where it will hold for months. For shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested waterbath process rather than this text.
- ServingCoarse, sweet-sour and mustardy — a condiment for cold meats, pork, beans and fried fish rather than a ketchup for potatoes. It improves after a week or two in the jar.
Green tomato catsup belonged to the end of the season, when frost was coming and the vines still carried fruit that would never ripen; the whole family of nineteenth-century "catsups" — walnut, mushroom, oyster, cucumber, tomato — were spiced vinegar preserves rather than the single sweet tomato sauce the word now means. The "Old Virginia" name here signals the Southern habit of chopped mustard pickles and chow-chows rather than any documented Virginia original. The mustard seed, celery seed and prepared mustard put it squarely in that chow-chow tradition, and the pound of brown sugar against a full charge of vinegar marks a sweet-sour balance common in American preserving of the period.