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Gooseberry Catsup
Mrs. H. Baird.
Five pints vinegar, four pounds green gooseberries, one-half pound brown sugar, one-half pound raisins, onequarter pound currants, one-quarter pound common salt, two ounces mustard, two ounces onions, one-half ounce chilies, one-half ounce allspice, one-half ounce ground ginger, one-half ounce ground mace, one-half ounce turmeric, one nutmeg. Boil the vinegar, currants, raisins, onions, gooseberries, and chilies till quite soft, then pour through a fine sieve on the remaining ingredients.
This is a thin, strained, vinegar-based sauce in the older sense of "catsup" — closer to a bottled brown sauce than to tomato ketchup. The recipe is a list plus one sentence, so a few things need filling in.
- The hinge: pour it on hotThe sugar, salt and ground spices are never cooked; they go into the strained liquid dry. Sieve the boiled mixture while it is still hot and stir until the salt and sugar are dissolved, or they may settle out as grit and the turmeric and mustard can taste raw.
- Green gooseberriesThese are underripe fruit, hard and very sour, and that acidity is doing structural work alongside the vinegar. Frozen gooseberries are fine; ripe dessert gooseberries or a substitute like green grapes will give a flatter, sweeter sauce.
- VinegarFive pints is a large volume and nineteenth-century malt and cider vinegar varied in strength. Use a standard 5 percent cider or malt vinegar; do not dilute it, since the vinegar is what keeps the finished sauce.
- The chiliesThe recipe does not say whether these are fresh or dried; half an ounce of dried chilies is a noticeable amount of heat by modern taste, and it migrates into the liquid you keep. Start with half that if you are unsure — you cannot take it out later.
- Mustard and salt"Two ounces mustard" means dry ground mustard powder, not prepared mustard. "Common salt" is plain non-iodized salt; a quarter pound is roughly six to seven tablespoons of fine salt, more if coarse. Iodized table salt can throw a metallic note in a long-keeping vinegar sauce.
- Onions and maceTwo ounces of onion is only about half a small onion, roughly chopped — it is strained out. Whole mace blades are hard to find now; the recipe calls for ground mace anyway, and half an ounce is about two to two and a half tablespoons, which is assertive but correct for the style.
- StrainingA fine sieve here means pressing the softened fruit through with a spoon or ladle, not just letting liquid drip, otherwise you lose most of the volume to the pulp. A food mill does the job faster. Discard the skins and seeds.
- Yield and keepingExpect roughly three to four pints of finished sauce. Bottle it in clean glass, refrigerate, and let it sit at least two or three weeks before using — the spices are harsh at first and settle into each other with age. Shake before pouring.
Before ketchup meant tomatoes, it meant any thin strained sauce kept in bottles to season meat and fish, a word generally traced to the Hokkien k ord-tsiap for a fermented fish brine and carried into English through Southeast Asian trade. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cookbooks are full of mushroom, walnut, oyster and cucumber catsups, and gooseberry belongs to that family: a hard, sour garden fruit that ripens in glut, boiled down with vinegar and spice into something that would sit on a shelf all winter. The spicing here \tur, mace, ginger, chilies, raisins and currants for sweetness and body — is the vocabulary of the British-Indian bottled sauces and chutneys familiar on Victorian tables, and it appears in The Home Cook Book, a Toronto community compilation of contributed receipts, under a subscriber's name because that is how such books were built: one household's standing recipe at a time. Gooseberry bushes were a common feature of Ontario and British kitchen gardens of the period, which is why a fruit almost absent from North American shops today warranted four pounds at a stretch.