Home › Pickles › Cold Tomato Catsup
Cold Tomato Catsup
One-half peck of ripe tomatoes chopped fine, one cupful nasturtiums chopped fine, one cupful of onions and two red peppers, all chopped fine; one cupful of white mustard seed, two tablespoonfuls of grated horseradish, one-half cupful of salt, one teaspoonful of black pepper, two ounces celery seed, one cupful of sugar, and one pint of vinegar. Bottle and seal tight..
This is an uncooked relish that the original directs you to seal into airtight bottles with no heat processing at all. That combination — raw low-acid vegetables, an anaerobic seal, indefinite room-temperature storage — is the specific arrangement modern food safety rules out. The notes below explain the measurements and the hazard; use a tested current recipe if you want a tomato catsup to keep.
- Why it fails: no heat, no processingNothing here is ever cooked, and nothing is boiling-water processed after filling. Sealing raw chopped vegetables into an airtight container and storing it at room temperature is exactly the anaerobic, low-oxygen environment in which Clostridium botulinum spores germinate and produce toxin. Salt and sugar at these levels do not prevent it.
- Why it fails: not enough acidOne pint of vinegar against roughly six to seven pounds of tomatoes plus onions, peppers and horseradish is nowhere near enough to bring the whole mixture to the pH 4.6 or below that makes a sealed pickle safe. Onions and peppers are low-acid, and tomatoes in general sit close enough to the 4.6 line that current guidance calls for added acid regardless of variety. Tested pickle recipes specify a vinegar of known strength in a fixed ratio for this reason.
- Half a peckA peck is eight dry quarts; half a peck is four, which works out to about 6 to 7 lb of tomatoes. It is the largest quantity in the recipe by a wide margin and sets the scale of the acid problem.
- NasturtiumsThe chopped nasturtiums are most likely the green seed pods rather than the flowers; the recipe does not say. The pods were a common home substitute for capers and give a sharp, peppery bite. Both the pods and the blossoms are edible, so the ingredient itself is not the issue here.
- White mustard seedYellow mustard seed, sold as such today. A whole cupful is a lot; in uncooked catsups it was there as much for its mild preservative reputation as for flavour, and that reputation does not hold up as a substitute for acidity and heat.
- "Bottle and seal tight"This meant corking or capping glass bottles, sometimes with wax or resin over the top. It was understood as a way to keep air out, not as a sterilising step, and it is the instruction that makes this recipe unusable rather than merely old-fashioned.
- If you want the flavourA nasturtium-and-horseradish tomato relish is a good idea. Find a current tested recipe with a specified vinegar-to-produce ratio and a boiling-water process time, or make a small batch as a fresh salsa and keep it refrigerated for a few days.
For most of the nineteenth century "catsup" named a whole family of thin, pungent, keeping sauces — mushroom, walnut, oyster, cucumber — and tomato was only the variety that eventually won. Within that family the cold or uncooked catsups formed their own small tradition: no boiling down, just chopping, heavy salting, a shot of vinegar and a great deal of mustard and celery seed, on the assumption that salt, spice and vinegar together would hold the mixture through the winter. The nasturtium pods are a marker of the older English kitchen garden, where they were pickled as "poor man's capers" and turn up in household books from the eighteenth century onward. Recipes like this one were printed in good faith by compilers who had no way to test acidity and no theory of anaerobic spoilage.