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Gooseberry Catsup
Nine pounds gooseberries, five pounds sugar, one quart vinegar, three table-spoons cinnamon, one and a half each allspice and cloves. The gooseberries should be nearly or quite ripe. Take off blossoms, wash and put them into a porcelain kettle, mash thoroughly, scald and put through the colander, add sugar and spices, boil fifteen minutes, and add the vinegar cold; bottle immediately before it cools. Ripe grapes prepared by same rule, make an excellent catsup. Mrs. Col. W. P. Reid, Delaware, Ohio.
A fruit catsup in the older sense: a thin, spiced, sweet-sour purée meant to be spooned over cold meat rather than a tomato sauce. The quantities are for a farm household putting up a season's worth, and everything scales down cleanly.
- The hinge: vinegar goes in cold, off the heatThe quart of vinegar is added after the fifteen-minute boil so its sharpness and aroma are not driven off. That also means the mixture cools somewhat before it reaches the bottles, so treat the result as a fresh condiment, not a shelf-stable preserve.
- Storage"Bottle immediately before it cools" is this recipe's whole method of sealing. Because the vinegar is stirred in cold, the fill temperature is unreliable; refrigerate the filled jars and use within a few weeks, or process filled jars by a current water-bath canning guide for a high-acid fruit condiment.
- Porcelain kettleAn enamelled cast-iron or stainless pan. The point is a non-reactive surface: a quart of vinegar plus gooseberry acid will strip bare cast iron and pick up a metallic taste from unlined copper.
- ColanderHere it means a sieve fine enough to hold back skins, stems and seeds. A food mill or a coarse mesh strainer with a stiff spatula does the work; the scalding step loosens the skins so the pulp passes.
- Scale it downA quarter batch is about 2 1/4 lb gooseberries, 1 1/4 lb (a scant 3 cups) sugar, 1 cup vinegar, 2 1/4 tsp cinnamon and a generous 1 teaspoon each of allspice and cloves.
- The spices are groundTablespoon quantities of cinnamon, allspice and clove read most naturally as ground spice, since they are added after the pulp has gone through the colander, and even so this is a heavily spiced sauce by current taste. Ground clove in particular dominates; start at half and add more at the end.
- Fifteen minutes is shortFor nine pounds of pulp that boil will not reduce much, and the cold vinegar thins it further. Cook until it mounds slightly on a spoon if you want the consistency of a modern condiment, and expect it to look loose while hot.
- Finding gooseberriesFresh gooseberries have a brief early-summer season and are scarce in much of North America; frozen work well, as the recipe mashes and sieves them anyway. "Nearly or quite ripe" matters — hard green fruit makes a sourer, more astringent catsup.
- ServingMeant for cold roast meats, ham, mutton and game. It also holds up beside strong cheese and pâté.
"Catsup" in a nineteenth-century American cookbook is a category, not a tomato product: any thin, strained, spiced and vinegared sauce bottled for the table, made from mushrooms, walnuts, currants, grapes, plums or, as here, gooseberries. Fruit catsups filled the same place at a cold-meat supper that chutney and cranberry sauce occupy now, and they were prized because the sugar and vinegar together let a summer glut keep. Gooseberries were a standard kitchen-garden bush in the Midwest when The Dixie Cook Book was compiled, which is why a contributor from Delaware, Ohio, could count on nine pounds at once; their later scarcity in the United States owes much to twentieth-century restrictions on planting Ribes, which host the white pine blister rust that threatened the timber industry. The note that ripe grapes work by the same rule is characteristic of these books, where a good method was expected to travel from one fruit to the next.