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Tomato Mustard
M. R. Beard.
One peck of ripe tomatoes; boil with two onions, six red peppers, four cloves of garlic, for one hour: then add a half-pint or half-pound salt, three tablespoons black pepper, half-ounce ginger, half-ounce allspice, half-ounce mace, half-ounce cloves; then boil again for one hour longer, and when cold add a pint of vinegar and a quarterpound of mustard; and if you like it very hot, a tablespoonful of cayenne.
This is a spiced tomato condiment in the older sense of "mustard" — a thick, hot table sauce closer to a ketchup than to anything in a squeeze bottle. The quantities are large and the salt is doing preservative work, so read them before you scale.
- A peck of tomatoesA dry peck is eight quarts, roughly 12 to 14 lb of ripe tomatoes. Halving or quartering the whole recipe is sensible unless you want several quarts of sauce.
- "Half-pint or half-pound salt"About a cup — a very heavy hand by modern taste, and deliberately so, since salt plus vinegar is the only preservation here. Reducing it makes a fresher-tasting sauce that must then be treated as a refrigerator condiment.
- The mustard is dry powderA quarter-pound of mustard means ground mustard flour, roughly a cup, not prepared table mustard. The recipe adds it only once the sauce is cold, which has the effect of keeping the bite, since heat drives off the volatile pungency.
- Six red peppersFresh ripe hot pods, not sweet bells — think cayenne or a similar long red chile. Six in a peck of tomatoes is moderate warmth, which is why the optional cayenne is offered at the end.
- Whole vs ground spiceHalf an ounce each of ginger, allspice, mace and cloves is roughly two to three tablespoons ground apiece. The recipe already adds them after the first hour, which suits ground spice; long cooking is generally held to turn clove and mace bitter.
- TextureTwo hours of open boiling will collapse the tomatoes and drive off a great deal of water. For a smooth sauce, press the mixture through a sieve or food mill after the first hour to remove skins, seeds and garlic and pepper debris.
- StorageThe recipe gives no processing instructions, and none should be improvised. Bottle it, refrigerate it, and use it within a few weeks; if you want a shelf-stable version, follow a current tested tomato-sauce canning procedure rather than this one.
- YieldThe full quantity makes a large batch — on the order of two to three quarts, depending on how far the tomatoes are reduced. It is a spooned table sauce for cold meat, not a dressing.
Nineteenth-century American cookbooks are thick with tomato ketchups, tomato soys and tomato mustards — all attempts to turn a glut of late-summer fruit into something that would keep through the winter and season plain boiled or roast meat. "Mustard" here appears to name the sauce by its sharpest ingredient, much as walnut and mushroom ketchups were named for what went into them. The Home Cook Book belongs to the charity-compilation tradition of the 1870s, in which recipes were solicited from local households and printed over the contributor's name; the attribution to M. R. Beard follows that convention. The heavy salt and the raw vinegar-and-mustard finish suggest it was made in bulk in season and expected to last, in a kitchen with a cool cellar and no refrigeration.