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Tomato Catsup (II)
Mrs. George Simpson.
Take a bushel of nice ripe tomatoes, and split, and sprinkle with salt, and lay twenty-four hours; mash them up and run through a sieve so as to waste nothing but seed and skin, and season to taste with red pepper and cloves; boil until it begins to settle at the bottom of the kettle, then add one quart of vinegar, then bottle and seal up tight.
This is a bulk preserving recipe from the era before anyone measured acidity, and its method of preservation is exactly where it fails. The notes below explain the scale and the terms, and why the sealing step is the problem.
- The acid ratio is the fatal flawA bushel of tomatoes is roughly 53 lb, and reduced catsup from that quantity still runs to a gallon or more. One quart of vinegar, of unstated strength, spread across that volume is a small addition. Tomatoes sit close to the pH 4.6 line that divides safe acid canning from low-acid canning, and some varieties fall on the wrong side of it; modern tested catsup recipes specify a measured quantity of vinegar or bottled lemon juice per batch for precisely this reason.
- "Bottle and seal up tight" is not processingHot-filling and sealing relies on the heat of the product alone. There is no boiling-water bath, no time, no headspace and no seal check. A sealed, oxygen-free jar of borderline-acid vegetable purée held at room temperature is the classic environment for Clostridium botulinum, whose spores survive boiling.
- Twenty-four hours of salted tomatoes at room temperatureSplit tomatoes sprinkled with salt and left standing for a day, presumably at ambient temperature, are being only lightly salted. The salt is nowhere near enough to control spoilage organisms, and the pulp may well be fermenting before it ever reaches the kettle.
- No quantities at allNo quantities for the seasonings -- Red pepper and cloves are "to taste" and the salt is unweighted. The seasoning and salting cannot be scaled, verified or reproduced, which is the other reason it cannot be brought up to a current standard by adjusting a number or two.
- If you want tomato catsupUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, one that gives weights, a stated quantity of acid and a processing time. Refrigerator catsup made in small batches and kept cold is the other honest option.
- Reading the original termsThe "kettle" here is a large open preserving pan, not a modern covered kettle, and "boil until it begins to settle at the bottom" appears to describe the point at which the reduced pulp thickens and sinks in the pan — the cook's gauge of thickness before thermometers were common in kitchens.
Tomato catsup of this kind belongs to the long transition from the fish- and mushroom-based ketchups of the eighteenth century, which were thin, dark, salty condiments poured over meat, to the thick sweet tomato sauce of the twentieth. Recipes like this one — no sugar, heavy on cloves and cayenne, thinned with vinegar at the end — are of the older kind, and their heat and spice were often said at the time to help preserve the sauce as well as flavour it. The Home Cook Book was a community compilation, its recipes contributed and signed by named subscribers such as Mrs. George Simpson, and the bushel-sized scale reflects a household putting up a season's worth of a garden crop in one long day's work. Commercially bottled catsup was already being sold by this period, and preservative-free versions of it were a subject of public argument for decades afterward; the shift away from home bottling of tomatoes owes a good deal to the food-safety science that arrived only later.