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Tomato Mustard (V)
Mrs. Carson.
One peck of tomatoes, one teacupful of salt; boil in a preserving pan half an hour; pulp it through a colander and return to kettle with the following: one dessert spoon of cloves, (ground spices), one of allspice, one of black pepper, one of ginger, one of cayenne, a little garlic, some onions, and a little curry powder. Let it boil down considerably, then strain through a sieve and add flour of mustard, until the proper thickness is obtained, and simmer for a short time; then bottle for use.
A Victorian bottled table sauce in the ketchup family, thickened with mustard flour rather than reduced alone. The proportions are workable as flavouring, but the preserving method is the problem.
- Why it fails todayThe sauce is boiled, then poured into bottles with no vinegar, no acidification and no processing time or temperature. Tomatoes sit near the borderline of safe acidity, and a thick, salted, sealed, oxygen-poor purée is exactly the environment in which Clostridium botulinum can produce toxin. Nothing in the method rules that out.
- Salt is not a preservative hereOne teacupful of salt to a peck of tomatoes works out at roughly five per cent of the raw weight, and higher once the sauce is boiled down. That is enough to season, and enough to slow some spoilage organisms, but not enough on its own to prevent Clostridium botulinum growing in a sealed, unacidified bottle.
- Use a current recipeIf you want a keeping tomato-mustard sauce, follow a modern tested recipe with measured vinegar and a specified boiling-water process. Treat this page as a historical document rather than a working method.
- A peckA dry peck is eight quarts, which for tomatoes runs to roughly 12-13 lb. The finished yield after boiling down "considerably" would be a small fraction of that.
- Teacupful and dessert spoonA Victorian teacup is taken as about half a pint, so roughly one cup of salt. A dessert spoon sits between a teaspoon and a tablespoon, about two teaspoons.
- Flour of mustardThis is simply finely ground mustard seed with the husk sifted out, sold today as mustard powder. It thickens as much by absorbing liquid as by any starch, and its pungency develops in cold liquid and is blunted by prolonged heat, which may be why the final simmer is kept short.
- Preserving panA wide, shallow pan meant for rapid evaporation. Any broad heavy-bottomed pot does the same job; avoid unlined copper or bare aluminium with this much salt and acid.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 from recipes contributed by named women, and the attribution to Mrs. Carson is the whole point of the format: these were household formulas passed between neighbours and printed with their owners' names attached. "Tomato mustard" belongs to the great Victorian family of bottled table sauces that grew up alongside commercial ketchups and Worcestershire-style relishes, and its seasoning list is worth noting: cloves, allspice, ginger, cayenne and curry powder. Mustard flour works as a thickener rather than long reduction alone, giving body and heat at once. The recipe calls for no vinegar, which marks it as a sauce meant to be used up over weeks, not a shelf-stable preserve in any sense we would now recognise.