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Tomato Mustard (IV)
Mrs. Spaulding.
One peck of tomatoes, ripe, half-pound salt, six red peppers, three tablespoonsful of black pepper, one ounce ginger, one ounce allspice, half ounce mace, half ounce cloves, a few cloves of garlic, two onions, quarter pound mustard, a tablespoonful of red peppers, and a half pint vinegar. Peel the tomatoes, and boil an hour with six red peppers; then add the other spices (excepting the mustard and vinegar, which are added after the sauce is strained through a colander and cooled), and boil another hour.
A nineteenth-century spiced tomato catsup, thickened and sharpened with dry mustard stirred in cold at the end. The quantities are large and the salt is heavy by modern taste; scaling to a quarter batch is sensible for a first attempt.
- A peck of tomatoesA peck is eight dry quarts, roughly 12-14 lb of ripe tomatoes. After peeling and two hours of boiling that reduces to something in the region of 2-3 quarts of finished sauce.
- Half a pound of saltEight ounces is a little under a cup of table salt, close to 4 percent of the weight of the tomatoes. It is there as a preservative as much as a seasoning; at modern tastes a third of it is plenty, though the sauce then keeps less well.
- The mustardA quarter pound is about a cup of dry mustard powder, not prepared table mustard. It goes in only after the sauce is strained and cooled, because heat destroys the pungency that mustard develops when moistened cold. This is the hinge of the recipe.
- Two lots of red pepperThe six red peppers boiled with the tomatoes are whole pods, fresh or dried cayenne-type. The later tablespoonful is presumably red pepper ground or chopped, though the recipe does not say. Together they make a genuinely hot sauce; halve both if you want a condiment rather than a heat source.
- Spices by weightAn ounce of ginger or allspice is roughly 4-5 tablespoons ground; half an ounce of mace or cloves about 2 tablespoons. Whole spices tied in a cloth are easier to remove than ground ones, which will pass straight through the colander.
- StrainingA colander will pass skins and seed fragments. For a smooth sauce work the pulp through a food mill or sieve instead, then return it to reduce if it has thinned.
- The panTwo hours of open boiling on 13 lb of tomatoes needs a wide, heavy, non-reactive pot. Stir often near the end; the sugars in reduced tomato scorch quickly and a burnt note will carry through the whole batch.
- Keeping itHalf a pint of vinegar across this volume gives nowhere near the acidity of a tested modern preserve, and it is added after cooking. Treat the finished sauce as a fresh refrigerated condiment, or freeze it. Do not water-bath or seal it for the pantry; use a current tested canning recipe if you want a shelf-stable version.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the mid-1870s from recipes contributed by named local women, which is why this one carries Mrs. Spaulding's name; the book prints four different tomato mustards in a row. "Tomato mustard" is a catsup in the older sense, a strained, heavily spiced fruit sauce meant to be spooned onto cold meat, with mustard flour supplying both bite and body. Home-made tomato catsups were common in American households through the nineteenth century, made in bulk at the end of the tomato season and relied on to carry flavour through the winter. The heavy hand with salt, ginger, allspice, mace and cloves reflects that preserving job.