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Cucumber Catsup
Pound some cucumbers in a mortar; sprinkle with salt and leave them for several hours to extract the juice. Strain off the liquid by twisting in a towel, season well, and boil. Pour into bottles and cork tightly until wanted for use.
This is a nineteenth-century "catsup" in the older sense — a strained, seasoned vegetable liquor bottled for the store cupboard — and the bottling method is the problem. The notes below explain the terms and then why the preserving step cannot be reproduced.
- What "catsup" meant hereBefore tomato ketchup took over the word, a catsup was a thin, salty, savoury liquid — mushroom, walnut, oyster, cucumber — used by the spoonful to season sauces and gravies. It is a flavouring, not a table condiment in the modern sense, and the recipe assumes a cook who will reach for it while building something else.
- "Season well" is doing a great deal of workOscar gives no quantities at all. Other period cucumber catsups often call for white pepper, mace, onion and horseradish, and some include vinegar. What is written here specifies nothing, so there is no way to know the salt or acid level of the finished liquid.
- Pounding in a mortarA food processor or blender does the same job in seconds; the purpose is only to rupture the cells so salt can draw the juice out. Twisting in a towel is the same operation as pressing pulp through a jelly bag or a fine chinois.
- Why the bottling failsCucumber juice is a low-acid, low-sugar vegetable liquid with a pH well above 4.6. Bringing it to a boil once and pouring it into corked bottles does not sterilise the bottles, does not seal them, and does not acidify the contents. That combination — low acid, sealed, room temperature — is the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum to germinate and produce toxin, which is odourless and tasteless.
- A cork is not a sealThe recipe's "cork tightly until wanted for use" gives just enough exclusion of air to favour anaerobic organisms while giving none of the vacuum, heat processing or headspace control that safe canning depends on. There is no processing time and no temperature beyond "boil."
- Salt alone is not preservationThe salt here is used to draw juice out of the cucumbers and ends up dissolved through the strained liquid at an unknown strength. Nothing in the method establishes a measured brine strength that would inhibit spoilage organisms.
- If you want the flavourUse a current, tested recipe for a refrigerated cucumber relish or a properly acidified pickle from a modern preserving authority, with measured vinegar and stated processing. Do not adapt this text.
Oscar Tschirky's The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf (1896) ran to nearly a thousand pages and swept in a great deal more than hotel cookery — including a whole tradition of English and American "store sauces" that were already going out of fashion by the time he wrote. Cucumber, mushroom and walnut catsups belong to an era when a household laid down bottled seasonings in the summer glut and drew on them all winter, before commercial Worcestershire, tomato ketchup and bouillon cubes made the practice redundant. The brevity of the entry is telling: Oscar assumed his reader already knew what a catsup was for and how heavily to season it, so he recorded only the mechanics. That assumption, and the corked bottle at the end of it, is exactly what separates a nineteenth-century store cupboard from a modern one — the period had no theory of botulism, which was not well understood in food preservation until the twentieth century's canning research.