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Cucumber Catsup
Three dozen cucumbers and eighteen onions peeled and chopped very fine; sprinkle over them three-fourths pint table-salt, put the whole in a sieve, and let drain well over night; add a tea-cup mustard seed, half tea-cup ground black pepper; mix well, and cover with good cider vinegar. - Mrs. Hattie Clemmons, Asheville, N. C.
An uncooked salt-and-vinegar relish rather than a simmered sauce, and closer to what a modern cook would call cucumber pickle relish. The whole method hinges on the overnight draining, which is what keeps the finished catsup from turning into a watery slurry.
- Yield, and how to scale itThree dozen cucumbers and eighteen onions is a crock-sized batch of a gallon or more, meant for a family that would eat relish all winter. A workable quarter batch is about 9 cucumbers (roughly 3 lb), 4 or 5 onions, 6 tablespoons salt, 3 tablespoons mustard seed and 1 1/2 tablespoons black pepper.
- Three-fourths pint of saltThat is about 1 1/2 cups of fine table salt. It is a curing dose, not a seasoning dose: much of it leaves with the drained liquid, though since the mixture is never rinsed the finished relish stays distinctly salty. Use plain non-iodized salt, since iodine and anti-caking agents cloud the brine.
- "Tea-cup"A nineteenth-century tea-cup is smaller than a modern measuring cup and is usually reckoned at about 3/4 cup, though the book gives no table. On that reading, roughly 3/4 cup mustard seed and 6 tablespoons ground black pepper for the full batch, which is aggressively peppery by current taste.
- The cucumbersGarden cucumbers of the period were generally smaller and seedier than supermarket slicers. Pickling cucumbers are the closest match; if using large slicers, halve and scrape out the watery seed core before chopping or the mixture will never drain dry.
- Draining is the step that mattersSet the sieve or colander over a bowl so the liquid actually runs off, and give it the full night. Squeeze the drained mixture in a clean towel before seasoning if it still feels wet.
- Cider vinegarUse commercial cider vinegar at 5 percent acidity, which is likely stronger and certainly more consistent than home-barrelled vinegar of the period. The vegetables must stay submerged; top up as they settle.
- StorageTreat this as a refrigerator relish in clean jars, where it will keep for a couple of months and improve after the first week. The recipe gives no processing time or temperature, so do not attempt to make it shelf-stable in sealed jars without following a current tested procedure.
- ServingThick and spoonable rather than pourable, it belongs beside cold meat, beans, or fried fish in the way a chow-chow does.
For most of the nineteenth century "catsup" (or catchup) meant any thin, keeping sauce built on a single dominant flavor, and tomato was only one option among many: mushroom, walnut, oyster, and cucumber catsups all appear in American and British cookbooks of the period, the word itself generally traced back through Malay and Chinese terms for fermented fish and shellfish brines. This version has drifted away from a pourable sauce entirely and toward the chopped, salted, mustard-seed relishes of the Southern pantry, the same family as chow-chow and cucumber "mangoes." Its presence in The Dixie Cook-Book, credited to a named contributor in Asheville, is typical of how these compilations are often said to have been assembled: publishers gathering household recipes from women across a region and printing them with the name and town attached. The salting-and-draining technique it relies on was the standard way to handle a late-summer glut of cucumbers before refrigeration, drawing out enough water that vinegar alone could carry the jar through the winter.