Homemade Tomato Catsup

This recipe is from The Housekeeper’s Encyclopedia by Mrs. E. F. Haskell, 1861. If you have alot of tomatoes from your garden this year, perhaps you would like to make some for yourself and for gifts. Everyone loves gifts from the garden!

Ingredients:
1 gallon tomatoes
3 tbsp. salt
3 tbsp. ground black pepper
3 tbsp. (dry) mustard, or ground mustard seed
1 tsp. ground allspice
4 peppers, type unspecified but “sweet”, not hot
1 onion (optional)
1 quart horseradish “juice” (roots grated and liquid pressed out)

The recipe:

Select tomatoes not overripe. Skin and strain the tomatoes; to every gallon add three tablespoons of salt, three of ground black pepper, three of mustard, and one teaspoon of ground allspice; mix the spices in a part of the tomato, and strain them through a sieve; put in a small bag four large pods of sweet peppers and, if relished, one onion, and boil them with the catsup while it is being reduced; add the expressed juice of one quart of horseradish, and reduce it until it is of the proper consistency to pour from the bottles without difficulty; let the catsup remain in the bottles, with a piece of cotton cloth tied loosely on the neck, for three months to ripen, when cork and seal tightly.

“Pepper pods” are simply whole peppers, not divisions thereof. Slicing them into strips will both free up flavoring elements and reduce the space the pepper bag takes up in the boiling pot. Depending on the type of pepper used, which is not easy since even producers of “heirloom” vegetables today often trace their varieties back only as far as the late 19th or even early 20th century, you may wish to remove the core and seeds before boiling.