Bright red ketchup – or perhaps catsup – is so familiar: squirted onto hotdogs, hamburgers, or next to fries. You see the condiment everywhere, gracing restaurant tables, filling fast food packets, and stashed in your refrigerator.
But I had never paused to question where ketchup originated, who made it, or that it might not have always come in its sweet, smooth, tomato-y form.
My handy-dandy copy of Lydia Child’s the American Frugal Housewife is where my ketchup quest began. When speaking of a recipe for ketchup, she writes that “the best sort of catsup is made from tomatoes.” Which immediately implies that there were other sorts of ketchup not made with tomatoes.
I soon discovered that if you were to ask a 19th century seat mate to “please pass the ketchup,” you could be handed a variety of different sauces.
I used the Association for Living History, Farm and Agricultural Museum’s (ALHFAM) member database to find my answers. It’s a wonderful resource for anyone interested in historical subjects! There are no requirements for membership, and it’s not very expensive if you want to join 😀
Many thanks to the Past Masters articles of Summer 2005 and Spring 2011!
One of the earliest ketchup recipes is from the East Indies and uses Kidney beans along with many spices and orange juice. This recipe qualifies the ketchup as being “in paste” form.
But much more popular ingredients for ketchup were mushrooms or walnuts.
Many of the recipes actually produce a very thin sauce, more akin to Worcestershire sauce. Oftentimes the base ingredient was the strained juice from pickled or cooked walnuts or mushrooms.
Nuts to You English Walnuts quotes this recipe:
WALNUT Ketchup. Take green Walnuts, and pound them to a Paste; then put to every Hundred two Quarts of Vinegar, with a Handful of Salt; put it all together in an Earthen Pan, keeping it stirring for eight Days; then squeeze the Liquor through a coarse Cloth, and put it into a well-tinn’d Sauce-pan, and when it being to boil skim it as long as any Scum rises, and add to it some Cloves, Mace, sliced Gin-ger, sliced Nutmeg, Jamaica Pepper-corns, sliced Horse-radish, with a few Shalots, and a little Garlick; let this have one Boil up, pour it into an Earthen Pan, and after it is cold bottle it up, dividing the Ingredients equally into each Bottle.
Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery, Made plain and easy
Tomatoes only started gaining popularity as ketchup ingredients in the late 18th century. But as Lydia Child advises that these red fruits make the best catsup, I made my own modern adaptation of her recipe.
Child’s first instruction is to squeeze the tomatoes up with your hands, salt them, and let them sit for a day.
After the 24 hours, the tomatoes should be “passed through a sieve,” the spices added, and then the mixture boiled down one third.
Mashing tomatoes through a sieve proved to be more difficult than I anticipated. After much squishing by me and other parties, there was still a lot of tomato left. I didn’t want to waste it all, so I decided to use some modern tech: a blender.
I pureed the tomatoes until the seeds wouldn’t be bothersome, and poured the thick soup into the tomato water. Then I added the called for spices.
I brought it to a boil, and then left it to simmer. The ketchup ended up simmering for about 8 hours! It got a bit forgotten about, but it turned out to be just what it needed.
The resulting dark red sauce was looser than Heinz, but definitely a consistency that could be dolloped onto a plate for meat, french fries, or whatever else you might want.
Perhaps the most striking difference to me was the lack of sweetness – there is no sugar in the recipe. Despite this, I really liked the “catsup!” It was very flavorful with all those spices and went well with meat.
Here is Lydia Child’s original recipe and my modern adaptation:
For now, have fun experimenting with your own ketchup recipes! If you’re interested in learning more about the condiment, I’m looking forward to reading ALHFAM’s recommended Pure Ketchup: A History of American’s National Condiment with Recipes by Andrew F. Smith.
Pederson, Carla. “Nuts to You English Walnuts.” Past Masters News, Spring 2011.
“Clarissa’s Corner: Catchup, Catsup, Katchup, Ketchup?” Past Masters News, Summer 2005.
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