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Tomato Catsup (V)
Miss Beaty.
Pour boiling water on the tomatoes; let them stand until you can rub off the skin, then cover them with salt and let them stand twenty-four hours. Then strain them, and to two quarts put three ounces of cloves, two ounces of pepper and two nutmegs. Boil half an hour, then add a pint of wine.
A thin, heavily spiced nineteenth-century tomato sauce, closer to a seasoning liquid than to modern bottled ketchup. The salt and the spices are both far heavier than a current palate expects, and neither is optional to think about.
- The spicing is the hingeThree ounces of cloves and two ounces of pepper to two quarts is on the order of a cup of whole cloves and a scant 1/2 cup of peppercorns — enough to make the sauce medicinal by modern taste. Start with a tablespoon of each, tied in cheesecloth so it can be pulled when the flavor is where you want it.
- "Cover them with salt"An unmeasured salt cure, and after twenty-four hours the tomatoes will be very salty indeed. Drain and taste the strained liquid before adding anything; you may want to dilute with fresh tomato pulp rather than salt-correct later.
- What the two quarts measuresThe two quarts is the strained tomato after salting, not the whole tomatoes you started with. Expect to need roughly 6-8 lb of ripe tomatoes to get there.
- StrainingA hair sieve was the standard period tool for this, and pressing removes seeds and skin fragments while keeping some pulp. A food mill on its coarsest plate does the same job; a blender does not, since it pulverizes the seeds, which can make the sauce bitter.
- NutmegsTwo whole nutmegs, grated — about 2 tablespoons of freshly grated. Pre-ground nutmeg is weaker and flatter; buy whole if you can.
- The wine'Wine' in a period catsup often meant a fortified wine such as sherry or Madeira, though this recipe does not say which. Add it at the end as directed, off a hard boil, so the aromatics survive.
- Consistency and yieldAn open half-hour boil will reduce the liquid somewhat, but this still finishes thin and pourable, meant to be shaken over meat and fish, not squeezed onto a burger. With the pint of wine in, expect somewhere between two and two and a half quarts.
- Keeping itThe original gives no sealing or processing instructions, and salt and wine alone are not a reliable preservative. Treat it as a fresh condiment: refrigerate it and use it within a couple of weeks, or follow a current tested recipe if you want shelf-stable jars.
Catsup in the mid-1870s was a family of sauces rather than one product — the word traces back through English "ketchup" to Southeast Asian fermented fish and soy sauces (kecap in Malay is generally cited as the source), and English cooks applied it to thin, keeping sauces made from mushrooms, walnuts, oysters and anchovies long before tomatoes entered the picture. Tomato versions became common in American cookery in the first half of the nineteenth century, and they were spiced and salted heavily because they had to survive months in a bottle without sugar, heavy vinegar or modern processing. The Home Cook Book, compiled in Chicago and first issued in the mid-1870s (the date commonly given is 1874), from recipes contributed by named women in Chicago and elsewhere, prints several tomato catsups in sequence — this is the fifth — which is how a community cookbook worked: every contributor's version stood as offered, and the reader chose whose kitchen she trusted.