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Tomato Mustard (III)
Mrs. George Simpson.
Slice and boil for an hour, with six small red peppers, half bushel of ripe tomatoes strain through a colander and boil for an hour, with two tablespoonsful of black pepper, two ounces ginger, one ounce allspice, half ounce cloves, one-eighth ounce mace, quarter pound salt. When cold add two ounces mustard, two ounces currie powder, and one pint of vinegar.
A Victorian tomato condiment in the ketchup family, built on a huge quantity of fruit and finished cold with mustard, curry and vinegar. The quantities are for a farmhouse putting up a season's supply, so scale before you start.
- Half a bushel of tomatoesA bushel of tomatoes runs about 53 lb, so half is roughly 26-28 lb. Quartering the whole recipe (about 6-7 lb of tomatoes) gives a manageable batch in a large stockpot.
- Two hours of boiling is the pointThe first hour softens the tomatoes and peppers for straining; the second reduces the strained pulp to a thick sauce. Use a wide heavy pan and stir often near the end, as the puree scorches easily once it thickens.
- Straining through a colanderThis is the pre-blender method of removing skins and seeds: press the softened pulp through with a wooden spoon or ladle. A food mill with a medium plate does the same job faster; a sieve gives a finer sauce.
- The spicesThe weights presumably refer to ground spices rather than whole; two ounces of ground ginger is somewhere around half to two-thirds of a cup, which tells you how assertive this sauce was meant to be. Scale them down with the tomatoes.
- Six small red peppersThese would have been small dried or fresh hot red pods, roughly cayenne strength. Two or three fresh cayennes, or a teaspoon of crushed red pepper, suits a quarter batch; adjust after the first hour when you can taste.
- SaltA quarter pound is about six tablespoons of fine salt for the full half bushel. It is functioning as both seasoning and preservative here, so do not cut it heavily unless you plan to refrigerate the whole yield.
- Mustard and curry added coldBoth go in off the heat and after cooling, which preserves the volatile pungency of the mustard and the aromatics in the curry powder. Whisk them to a smooth paste with some of the vinegar first, or they will stay lumpy.
- Curry powder in 1877Commercial curry powder of the period was a turmeric-heavy blend with coriander, cumin, fenugreek and chilli. Any standard mild curry powder is a reasonable stand-in; a hot Madras blend will push the sauce well past what was intended.
- Yield and keepingThe full recipe makes a couple of gallons. Only a pint of vinegar goes into that volume, so the finished sauce is not reliably acidic enough to be shelf-stable by modern standards. Refrigerate or freeze what you make, and if you want it on a shelf, follow a current tested tomato-condiment canning recipe rather than this one.
The Home Cook Book belongs to the first great wave of North American community cookbooks, compiled from recipes contributed by named local women and sold to raise money for a hospital; the attribution to Mrs. George Simpson is the whole point of the form, since a neighbour's name was the guarantee of quality. "Tomato mustard" is one of a crowd of nineteenth-century tomato sauces that also went by catsup, ketchup and chili sauce, the distinctions between them loose and regional. What sets this one apart is the mustard and curry powder stirred in cold at the end, a habit that recalls the British table sauces of the period, when curry powder was a familiar grocery item in the anglophone kitchen and functioned as a general savoury seasoning rather than a marker of Indian cooking. The scale, half a bushel at a time, reflects a household preserving the September tomato glut in one long day at the stove.