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Tomato Catsup
Miss Brokovski.
Boil the tomatoes until quite soft, and rub them well through a sieve: to every quart add two ounces shalots and large red peppers, or one teaspoonful cayenne pepper, one ounce bruised ginger, one spoonful salt, a few cloves; boil until reduced one-third; ten minutes before taking off the fire add a half-pint vinegar to each quart.
A spiced, unsweetened tomato sauce of the older sort — sharp with vinegar and ginger rather than sugar. The proportions are given per quart of strained pulp, not per quart of whole tomatoes, which changes the arithmetic considerably.
- Work from the strained pulpBoil and sieve first, measure second. Roughly 3-5 lb of ripe tomatoes, depending on how watery they are and how far they are cooked, gives about a quart of thin pulp.
- A food mill replaces the sieveThe point of rubbing through a sieve is to leave skins and seeds behind. The medium plate of a food mill does the same job in a fraction of the time; a blender does not, since it pulverises the skins into the sauce.
- "One spoonful salt"Ambiguous in the original — nineteenth-century recipes use the word for anything from a teaspoon to a tablespoon. Start with two teaspoons per quart and correct at the end, once the sauce has reduced and concentrated.
- Shallots and peppersTwo ounces of shallots is about two large ones, chopped. "Large red peppers" here means dried hot pods, not sweet bell peppers; the cayenne alternative given in the recipe tells you the heat level intended.
- Bruised gingerAn ounce of whole ginger root, smashed with the flat of a knife so it perfumes the sauce without dissolving into it. The recipe does not say whether dried or fresh root is meant. Whole cloves and the ginger should be fished out or strained off before bottling, or the spice keeps building and turns medicinal.
- Reduction and the late vinegarReducing by a third takes 45 minutes to an hour at a steady simmer, stirring often — tomato pulp scorches readily. Adding the half-pint of vinegar only in the last ten minutes keeps its sharpness, since prolonged boiling drives off some of the acetic acid.
- Yield and storageSomething close to 1 3/4 quarts of finished catsup from two quarts of pulp, once the vinegar is added. Treat it as a fresh sauce: bottle it, refrigerate, and use within two or three weeks. For shelf storage, follow a current tested canning procedure — tomatoes sit near the borderline of safe acidity and the recipe gives no processing instructions at all.
The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" to raise money for the Hospital for Sick Children, and it is generally cited as the first fundraising community cookbook published in Canada — hence the contributor's name, Miss Brokovski, attached to the recipe like a signature. The catsup itself belongs to the older, thinner tradition: the word is usually traced to Hokkien Chinese kê-tsiap, a name for a fermented fish sauce that reached English through Southeast Asian trade, and English cooks applied it to a whole family of savoury bottled sauces made from mushrooms, walnuts, oysters and eventually tomatoes. What is most telling here is what is missing. There is no sugar. The thick, sweet, deep-red condiment most people now picture is a later commercial development; this is a spiced vinegar sauce meant to be shaken over meat and fish, and it would have been made in quantity in September when the tomatoes came in all at once.