Ketchup and Mustard

Okay, okay. So I should have run this column last month when all the necessary ingredients were coming in off the garden. So write my mother a letter. Anyhow, you’ve probably got produce still coming in, unless it all burned up in the drought, so I’m not that late. So there!

So! (a needle pulling thread, La, a note to follow so, Ti . . . sorry, I get carried away . . . now where was I? Oh yeah!) It’s high summer and according to Garrison Keillor this is the time that your house gets slowly invaded by vegetables. Now I can’t much help that you got over-enthusiastic when you planted the garden last spring and put in ten zucchini vines when two would have done, and five hills of watermelons when you eat maybe one melon per summer, but I can help when it comes to the tons of tomatoes that your plants are producing. It’s called ketchup.

Ketchup is one of those things that most people eat a fair amount of, unless maybe they got a thing about whitebread culture. It made Henry Heinz’s fortune when he had the idea of modifying the Indonesian ketjap, a series of vegetable sauces, to make them with tomatoes (a pretty adventurous idea in itself; there were still people at the time who thought maybe them love apples were poisonous). Lots of people followed him, and finally the stuff got to be an inoffensive sweet sauce which ain’t got much to say for it at the commercial level. Which is another reason to make your own.

This ketchup is not exactly ketchup; my wife says it’s more like chili sauce to her, but not so peppery. It comes from Linda West Eckhardt’s The Only Texas Cookbook which is a neat place for Texan recipes, and good for giving to exiles and others who are stuck where you can’t go out to Threadgill’s or somewhere and get real Texan cooking. (Someday I may go into her recipe on how to fix a brisket in the oven for cooks without a proper barbecue pit.) Of course, I meddled with it some to avoid copyright problems.

TOMATO KETCHUP

Quarter the tomatoes and purée them in a food processor along with the bell pepper. Strain the purée through a coarse sieve to remove the skins and seeds (or pour it into a colander and work it through with your hands until there’s nothing in the colander but a dry pulp of skins and seeds). Purée the onions, combine with the tomato-pepper mixture, and pour into a large stainless steel or enameled kettle. (It’s important not to use aluminum, copper or cast iron; the acid in the tomatoes will corrode the metal, and make the ketchup taste bad.) Cook and stir over low heat until the mixture is reduced by about a third and is considerably thicker. Meanwhile, put the garlic, peppercorns, allspice, nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon and celery seed into the vinegar in a small pot (again, stainless steel or enamel only!) and simmer, covered, for about half an hour to steep the spices in the vinegar. Pour about half the spiced vinegar through a tea strainer into the thickened tomato mixture. Stir. Also add the sugar, mustard, cayenne, and salt at this point. Now taste the mixture and adjust the spicing for any you think necessary. Don’t be afraid to fiddle around with it a little until it suits your own taste, but don’t get too enthusiastic about adding things either. Piece of advice: you can always put more salt in, but it’s hell getting it back out once it’s in the pot. Cook it down awhile longer, until it looks about as thick as you think ketchup oughta look. the mixture will probably lumpy or curdled at this point. Run it through the food processor for a bit, until it smoothes out some.

The next item is canning this stuff. Get you a big (12 quart or so) enamel kettle at the local supermarket (if you don’t have a pressure cooker or canning kettle anyway). Find a rack that fits in the bottom of the kettle, so the jars will not sit directly on the bottom of the pot. Get some one-pint Mason jars and canning lids. Boil the jars for five minutes to sterilize them, or run them through the dishwasher and use them immediately the cycle gets through. Put the jar lids (not the rings) in a pan of hot water on the stove, and keep a low flame under them, to soften the seal ring so it seals properly. NEVER reuse a lid that’s been used for something else; the rubber part is shot and won’t seal properly, even if it looks fine. Especially you never reuse anything that’s been around something with vinegar in it because the vinegar will have corroded whatever-it-was and, to quote Douglas Adams, you “wind up looking very silly, or dead, or both, trying.”

Fill the jars with the ketchup, leaving about an quarter of an inch empty space for expansion. Make sure there aren’t any drips on the lips of the jars, or they won’t seal properly. Fish the jar lids out of the hot water and seal the jars, tightening the rings over them well. Put the jars on the rack in the kettle, and pour in warm (not cold or hot) water. Bring the kettle to a boil, and let it boil for fifteen minutes. If you have a pressure cooker, leave the relief valve open. Fish the jars out carefully, and let them cool on the counter. If your jars sealed right, the lids will be slightly concave when cool (you may hear the lids pop as the jars cool and the lids seal).

Now you got your ketchup, and you start your next cookout, and . . . YOU FORGOT TO GET THE MUSTARD. Now how you gonna have proper hamburgers and hot dogs without mustard? Well, I can fix that too. My favorite for mustards is a sweet German mustard I got (after appropriate meddling) from Helen Witty and Betty Colchie’s Better Than Store-Bought. Now that’s another great cookbook for do-it-yourself cooks; the subtitle is “Authoritative Recipes for the Food that Most People Never Knew They Could Make at Home.” Want to make your own sausage? pastrami? pasta? pickles? liqueurs? bagels? Sweet & Sour Sauce? They got recipes for all these and more.This does take about four hours to make because you gotta soak the mustard seeds, so start about lunchtime to have mustard for supper.

This mustard is great for putting on sausage or other meats, and my stepmother loves it as a vegetable dip.

SWEET GERMAN-STYLE MUSTARD

Soak together the mustard seeds, dry mustard, hot water, and half a cup of the cider vinegar for at least three hours. An hour before you want to complete the mustard, put in everything else except the Karo. Bring to a boil, boil for one minute, and let stand for an hour.

Scrape the soaked mustard mixture into the container of a blender (best) or food processor. Strain into the spiced vinegar, pressing on the solids in the strainer to extract all possible flavor. Process the mustard, covered, until it looks like a coarse purée with a definite graininess. Pour the mustard into a stainless steel pan and cook over low heat for ten minutes, stirring constantly, until the mixture has thickened noticeably (it will thicken more as it cools). Remove the pan from the heat, add the Karo, and pour into a storage jar. Let the mustard cool uncovered, then put a lid on the jar and store it either at room temperature or in the refrigerator.

Okay, so now you’re set to go out in the back yard and heat up that grill. Anything else you burn, you’re on your own.

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10 pounds utterly ripe tomatoes	1 teaspoon whole cloves
1 red bell pepper, deveined and chopped	4 cinnamon sticks
4 large yellow onions, chopped	1 teaspoon celery seeds
1½ cups cider vinegar	¾ teaspoon dry mustard
2 garlic cloves, crushed	¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 tablespoon black peppercorns	6 tablespoons firmly packed brown sugar
½ teaspoon allspice	1 tablespoon salt

¼ cup whole mustard seeds (yellow, black, or mixed)	2 small garlic cloves, peeled and halved
5 tablespoons dry mustard (imported is best)	¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ cup hot tap water	¼ teaspoon ground allspice
1 cup cider vinegar	¼ teaspoon dill weed
¼ cup cold water	¼ teaspoon dried tarragon, crumbled
2 large slices of onion	2 pinches ground cloves
2 tablespoons dark brown sugar, packed	2 tablespoons white Karo syrup
1½ teaspoons salt