Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Tomato Mustard (II)
Tomato Mustard (II)
Mrs. Spence.
Boil one peck tomatoes for one hour with six red peppers, strain through a colander, and add a half pound salt, three tablespoons of black pepper ground, one ounce ginger ground, one ounce allspice ground, half ounce cloves ground, two onions; boil for another hour, then add quarter pound mustard and half pint of vinegar, then bottle.
This is a bottled tomato condiment of the catsup family, and the instruction it ends on — "then bottle" — is the whole problem. The notes below explain the quantities and why the method is no longer usable.
- Why it fails: no processing at allThe mixture is poured into bottles hot and closed, with no boiling-water bath, no headspace, no seal check and no stated temperature or time. Tomatoes sit close to the borderline of the acid range, and a sealed, oxygen-poor container of tomato purée held at room temperature without reliable acidification is a recognised setting for Clostridium botulinum, which produces toxin without any smell, gas or off flavour to warn you.
- Why it fails: the acid is unmeasuredHalf a pint of vinegar of unknown strength against roughly twelve pounds of tomatoes is nowhere near enough to guarantee a pH below 4.6, the line above which botulinum can grow. Some tomato varieties test above pH 4.6, which is why current guidance specifies added acid of known strength rather than trusting the fruit itself.
- Why it fails: salt is not the safeguard hereHalf a pound of salt to a peck of tomatoes is a heavily salted condiment, and more concentrated still once the purée reduces, but it is well short of the levels at which salt reliably preserves. The same is true of the spices; ginger, cloves and allspice have mild antimicrobial activity and no reliable preserving power.
- A peckA dry peck is eight quarts, about a quarter bushel — roughly 12 to 14 lb of tomatoes, which cooks down a great deal over the two hours of boiling. This is a batch scaled for a household putting up a season's supply.
- "Six red peppers"Genuinely ambiguous. Nineteenth-century cookbooks use "red pepper" for dried cayenne pods, for fresh sweet peppers, and occasionally for ground cayenne, and nothing in the wording settles it. The heat of the finished condiment could differ by an order of magnitude depending on which was meant.
- "Quarter pound mustard"The recipe does not specify the form; ground mustard is the likeliest reading. It goes in at the end, after the second hour of boiling, along with the vinegar. Mustard's sharpness comes from a reaction that needs moisture and is diminished by prolonged heat, so late addition preserves more of it, though the recipe gives no reason for the ordering.
- If you want the flavourUse a current, tested recipe for tomato mustard or spiced tomato catsup from a food-preservation authority, with specified vinegar acidity and a processing time. Do not adapt this one.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada," and is generally credited as the first Canadian fundraising cookbook, with proceeds going to the Hospital for Sick Children; the contributors' names attached to individual receipts, like Mrs. Spence here, were part of the point. Tomato condiments dominate the preserving chapters of books of this period — catsups, chili sauces, tomato soys and tomato mustards — because tomatoes arrived all at once, in quantity, and a household that grew them had to convert a peck at a time into something that would keep on a shelf. "Mustard" in this context means a thick, spiced, spoonable sauce rather than the smooth condiment sold in jars today, and it sat closer to what we would call a relish or a brown sauce, eaten with cold meat. The absence of any sealing instruction is not carelessness on Mrs. Spence's part so much as the state of knowledge: the bacterial cause of spoilage in home-bottled vegetables was not understood in domestic kitchens for decades afterward, and cooks judged a batch by look and smell, which for botulinum tells you nothing.