ISSUE 27, SAUCES, Part 3: Tomato Catsup
We call it a condiment now, but it appeared in the sauce section of cookbooks
Tomato Catsup
I was asked by a reporter what was the most important southern recipe to emerge between the American Revolution and the Civil War. There were a few candidates that came immediately to mind: the baking soda biscuit, the mint julip, southern fried chicken. In the end I opted for tomato catsup, a sauce or condiment that did not exist when the United States was born, but was greatly popular at the time of the American centennial. At the millennium it stood as the most important condiment in the country. The rise of salsa since 2000 split the tomato following, and mayonnaise foremost in 2020 in terms of aggregate sales.
Before tomato catsup there was a panoply of catsups—fermented sauces that concentrated amino acids and supplied that earthy umami depth to dishes as a condiment. In my archive of early southern recipes I have directions for Anchovy Catsup, Cucumber Catsup, Gooseberry Catsup, Grape Catsup, Lemon Catsup, Mushroom Catsup, Oyster Catsup, Pepper Catsup, and Green Walnut Catsup. In the early 1820s in Maryland tomato catsup was added to the repertoire. The first recipe appears in an October 4, 1823 issue of the Easton Gazette:
Tomata Catsup: Wipe the tomatas clean, and slice them in a deep pan, to every layer sprinkle a handful of salt, let them lie for twelve hours, put them in a skillet and let them boil four or five minutes, then strain them through a coarse cloth, to get all the juice, pour it in the skillet again and boil it briskly thirty inutes: to one quart of liquor add a quarted of an ounce of mace, ginger, and half a quarter of an ounce of white pepper, strain it through a thin cloth, and when cold bottle it, and cork it tight; put four or five blades of mace, and six cloves in each bottle, and some nutmeg. Shake the bottle when used.
The thin texture of this first form of catsup mirrored the liquid anchovy catsup, a preparation that with the addition of tamarind in the 1830s would morph into Worcestershire Sauce. There were other ways of going about making catsup, resulting in thicker texture. The American Farmer (the United States’ first national agricultural periodical—based in Baltimore) offered the a version closer to our sense of tomato ketchup in 1827.
These first recipes for tomato catsup were formulated before sugar became cheap and widely available in the country. (1825 is the tipping point year when refined sugar prices fell because of output from Georgia and Louisiana refineries becoming productive.) The original savory form of tomato catsup would always put heat and spice forward. The catsups of the 1830s began adding sugar—brown usually.
Most of the early experimentation about the culinary preparation of tomato catsup took place in the South, largely because it was only in that region that tomatoes were popular. It took a medical campaign in the late 1830s that asserted the hygienic salubriousness of the tomato to make it loved in other regions. In manuscript recipe collections from the antebellum period, tomato catsup rivaled black cake as the most frequently encountered formula.
Bottled tomato catsup was a grocery fixture as early as 1830—and the question is whether the earliest commercial forms of this catsup were imported from England or American-made. Local manufactories sprang up in numbers of towns up and down the Atlantic seaboard. In 1870 Maybin Griffin, the African-American caterer and hairdresser of Edgefield SC, began incorporating some of the ketchup his manufactured and sold into the barbecue sauce he employed cooking for events. While some barbecuists had used tomato sauce in their barbecue sauce, Griffin is the first recorded user of catsup. It is not known whether his style of catsup employed sugar or not.
One last thought: the intensely red tomato was a creation of the latter half of the 19th century, so the early ketchup were more orange or more purple in coloration that what we carry in our mind’s eye.