Homemade Catsup: Historical Food Fortnightly Challenge #2 & 3

For background on the Historical Food Fortnightly, click here.

The Challenge(s):
Challenge 2. Soups and Sauces June 15 - June 28
Soups, stews, sauces, gravies! Make a soup or a sauce from a historical recipe.

Challenge 3. Today in History June 29 - July 12
Make a dish based on or inspired by a momentous occasion that took place on the day you made it. Get creative - you would be surprised by all the interesting things that happened every single day!

A number of personal, friend, and family issues conspired to prevent me from making my homemade catsup as planned for challenge #2, but then I realized that if I made it on July 4, I could still make the ketchup with the purchased tomatoes and count it, since what could be more American than catsup  on a day that I wasn't going to be going to any barbecue gathering (due to our current Peruvian location).

The Recipe: Catsup, The Frugal Housewife, Lydia Child (taken from a book by Susannah Carter), [late 1700s or early 1800s] (p. 33 in this edition or pg 26, search on "catsup" in the free Kindle edition to find.) 

Screen grab of the recipe itself\

*Note, when putting in the reference for this recipe, I noticed the title was "The Frugal Housewife."  I had bookmarked this link as Lydia Child's book the American Frugal Housewife and when trying to figure out why the difference in title, learned that Lydia Child copied an earlier book by Susannah Carter.  I checked the Kindle version of the American Frugal Housewife and the recipe and instructions are identical except that Lydia Child added you were supposed to remove the garlic before the catsup is bottled.  Lacking that information, I had elected to mince the garlic clove.

How Did You Make It: I got four tomatoes.  By the time that I got around to making this recipe on July 4, they were a little bruised and overripe, but I decided that added to the authenticity.  I used a stainless steel pot to cook the tomatoes and hand squeezed the tomatoes as suggested.  I "set in" the cooked tomatoes with salt and left out on the counter.  I hypothesize they did not cool the catsup (no refrigerators) but counted on the high quantity of spices and salt to preserve it.  After the 24 hour period, I moved my catsup to the fridge but left it in the open bowl intending to come back and spice it the next day.  By the time I got around to finishing this (6 days after initially cooking the tomatoes), the extra liquid had evaporated. Because of that, I just added spices and didn't bother cooking again to reduce the mixture. I don't have a sieve here in Peru and I'm not going to buy one so we lived with seeds in the catsup. 

Spicing: Per usual, there are not directions regarding the amount of spice other than to say "generous."  For four average sized round tomatoes, I used 4 balls of allspice, 1 peppercorn, 1 whole clove (I crushed the whole spices and then chopped on a cutting board as I don't have a mortar and pestle or grinder here), a generous shake of ground cloves, shake of ground pepper, shake of sea salt in addition to salt added the first day, 1 minced garlic clove, pinch of nutmeg (instead of mace).  Spices are very expensive here so I skipped buying mace and subbed nutmeg instead and you cannot buy mustard seed here.  I could buy an overpriced jar of ground mustard seed but I opted not to do that.

Time to Complete: About 1 hour (completed in parts).

Total Cost: I am not sure how much my tomatoes cost (my husband went to market) but I'm guessing the whole thing was rather cheap, less than $2USD.

How Successful Was It?: I really enjoyed the taste- the flavors were much more nuanced than a store bought ketchup today.  There was no sugar or vinegar in the recipe so it tasted quite different and was full of unexpected flavors.  I can imagine they enjoyed something like this with meat and it's relatively easy to make. We happened to have a roast made and it was delicious!  (Although the cloves came out a little strong and our 6 year old preferred the modern ketchup.)

I would make this again for modern life and/or for my Civil War reenacting.  My husband tried it with both the roast and on quinoa patties and said he thought it complemented the meat especially well.

How Accurate Is It?: As accurate as I could make it given where I was with the tools and ingredients I had.

Time to Research:  Approximately 1 hour, not long at first as I figured I could find a catsup recipe in Lydia Child's book, but a little longer to solve the mystery of the title page that didn't have an author's name nor publication date.

I put the tomatoes in boiling water and then
slipped the skins off.  Here are the skins by themselves.

The yield from four tomatoes (skin off, quartered).

I accidentally made some homemade butter from cream when trying to do whipped cream
in my (overly) powerful food processor.  So I used a little of it for this recipe,
which recommended putting the tomatoes in a pot with a little butter, salt, and spoonful of water.

My spices.  Started with whole spices where possible but I used
what I had.  Spices are 2-3x as much as I pay for them in the States.
Conventional spices here in Peru are even more expensive than organic spices back home.

My first attempt at crushing the spices (using two nesting glass bowls).

Then I moved to chopping the spices (allspice balls and peppercorns).

The finished product on a quinoa patty.

Four tomatoes yielded only this much catsup.