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Raw Tomato Catsup
One peck of ripe tomatoes, peel and slice; put in a jar and sprinkle one teacupful of salt between each layer; let stand over night; then drain through a sieve; chop fine four red peppers (or a little cayenne pepper), one quart of vinegar, one pound sugar, two ounces of celery seed, one cupful of onions chopped, one cupful nasturtiums. Keeps well. Bottle.
This is an uncooked tomato relish sealed into bottles and kept at room temperature, and that is the part that cannot be carried into a modern kitchen. The notes below explain the units and the failure.
- Why it fails: no heat, no measured acidityNothing in this recipe is cooked, and the bottles are not processed. One quart of vinegar of unstated strength is spread across a peck of drained tomatoes plus onions, peppers, celery seed and nasturtiums, and the final acidity cannot be determined from the text. Sealed, oxygen-poor bottles of vegetable mixtures of unknown pH held at room temperature are the setting in which Clostridium botulinum can grow, and neither the salt nor the sugar here can be relied on to prevent it. Use a current, tested tomato ketchup or relish recipe instead.
- "Keeps well" meant something elseThe phrase was never a claim of sterility and is not a shelf-stability standard; it recorded only the writer's expectation that the bottles would not spoil visibly in storage.
- A peckA peck is a dry measure of two gallons — roughly 12 to 13 lb of tomatoes, which is why the salt and sugar quantities look so large. The finished yield after draining would have been several quarts.
- A teacupfulA teacup in books of this period is usually reckoned at about three-quarters of a modern cup, and probably smaller than the "cupful" used later in the recipe. The salt here is a drawing agent, not seasoning: it pulls water out of the sliced tomatoes overnight so the mixture is not soupy.
- Two ounces of celery seedWeight, not volume, and it is a great deal — roughly half a cup of seed. Celery seed appears frequently in nineteenth-century American catsup recipes.
- NasturtiumsMost likely the green seed pods, pickled and used as a caper substitute, though the flowers were also eaten. Both parts of the plant are edible; they are not the problem with this recipe.
Before tomato catsup meant a single thick, sweet, cooked sauce, it named a whole family of bottled table condiments — walnut, mushroom, oyster, cucumber and tomato among them — descended from the fermented fish and soy sauces that English traders knew as ketchup, a word generally traced to Southeast Asian originals. "Raw" or "cold" catsups like this one were chopped, salted, dosed with vinegar and bottled without the hours of reducing that a cooked catsup required, which made them a practical way to use up a glut of ripe fruit in a hot kitchen. The nasturtium seeds are a frugal touch typical of the period, when capers were an imported luxury. Recipes of this sort seem to have grown scarce in household books as commercial bottled catsup became cheap and as state and federal food regulation after 1906 turned attention to what did and did not keep safely in a bottle.