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Cucumber Catsup
Grate the cucumbers and thoroughly drain; add six onions chopped very fine to one gallon of the grated and drained cucumbers; add cayenne pepper and horseradish to taste. Bottle it without cooking.
This is a raw, sealed vegetable preserve with no acid, no measured salt and no heat step, which puts it outside anything that can be recommended today. The notes below explain the specific failures rather than offering a fix.
- No acid at allMost catsups of this period rely on vinegar, which is what makes bottling safe. Cucumbers and onions are both low-acid vegetables, roughly pH 5 to 6, and nothing here brings that down.
- "Bottle it without cooking"A sealed bottle of moist, low-acid vegetable pulp held at room temperature is a textbook anaerobic environment for Clostridium botulinum. The organism produces no gas or off smell reliably enough to warn you, and the toxin is not something you can taste.
- Salt is unmeasured, and probably assumedSalt is unmeasured, and possibly assumed -- Draining grated cucumber often involved salt, but the recipe never quantifies or even mentions it. The instruction as printed gives a modern reader nothing to work from, and salt at edible levels would not preserve this anyway.
- Cayenne and horseradish are not preservativesBoth have mild antimicrobial activity in laboratory conditions and none that matters in a bottle of cucumber pulp. "To taste" gives no functional dose.
- A gallon of raw pulpThere is no headspace, closure or storage temperature specified, so the conditions the original relied on are unrecoverable.
- If you want cucumber catsupUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, with weighed salt, a stated vinegar strength and a processing time. Leave this one on the page.
Cucumber catsup belongs to the long era when "catsup" meant almost any thin, spiced, bottled sauce rather than the sweetened tomato condiment that eventually monopolised the word. Nineteenth-century American cookbooks carry walnut, mushroom, oyster, grape, gooseberry and cucumber catsups, all of them meant to be shaken over meat or fish at table, and all of them the product of a kitchen with a summer glut and no refrigeration. Grated raw cucumber pressed dry and bottled with onion and pepper was a way of keeping something green-tasting into the autumn. Recipes of this kind appear in the pickle sections of household books well into the twentieth century, usually with vinegar, though it is left out here. Codified canning standards, with tested acid levels and processing times, reached American home kitchens only later.