Catsup (or ketchup, as it is usually spelled these days) has a fairly definite meaning today: it is a thick, sweet sauce made from tomatoes. Before about the mid 20th century, though, and especially in the 19th century, catsup was a much more generic term for a thin sauce that tasted strongly of one of a number of different ingredients. Not all catsup back then was tomato based, and the loss of variety in catsups is another example of how, over time, the variety of foods we have has dwindled in some ways.

Not to say that tomato catsup wasn’t popular back then, though. It shows up often in old cookbooks. An example comes from Kate Brew Vaughn’s Culinary Echoes from Dixie, printed in 1917. Her recipe was fairly typical, requiring a peck of tomatoes, four large onions, salt, a host of spices including cloves, allspice, and mustard, brown sugar, vinegar, and a few peach leaves to round out the taste.

That cookbook included another recipe typical of old cookbooks: mushroom catsup. Tomatoes are naturally juicy, while mushrooms aren’t. To get liquid for mushroom catsup, the cook placed a pint of mushrooms in an earthen jar, with layers of salt alternating with layers of mushrooms, and let the jar stand for 24 hours in a warm place. The liquid was strained out, and peppercorns, allspice, ginger root, cloves, and mace were added. All of this was boiled, simmered, strained, and then bottled, resulting in a runny liquid that would obviously taste strongly of mushrooms (and since these would probably be wild mushrooms, the taste would be fairly intense).

That wasn’t the extent of the variety of catsups. Buckeye Cookery, from 1877, included recipes for cucumber, current, cherry, gooseberry, and tomato catsups. Something like with the mushroom catsup, the cucumber catsup recipe had the cook peel and chop very fine 3 dozen cucumbers and 18 onions, sprinkle them with salt, and let them drain overnight. This liquid was then used for the catsup, to which was added mustard seed, black pepper, and cider vinegar.

The cherry catsup recipe combined 1 pint of cherry juice with a half to three-quarter pound of sugar. To this was added cloves, cinnamon, and a little cayenne pepper. The mixture was then boiled to a thick syrup and bottled.

Sadly, the old cookbooks only include the recipes, but not the instructions of just what to do with these various catsups. The recipes in the Buckeye Cooking book take large amounts of raw materials, such as nine pounds of gooseberries or half a bushel of tomatoes. This makes it apparent that catsups served a couple of purposes. They used large amounts of raw materials, which at harvest time might spoil rapidly. Those materials would be boiled and cooked down into a much more manageable amount of liquid distillation of taste, which could be bottled and used weeks or months later.

This points to one reason why these various catsups have fallen from favor. Most people today do not grow their own food, and so they do not have large amounts of fruits or vegetables coming to them at one time. If they do, they have more options today of processing and keeping those foods, such as canning or freezing. While cucumber or cherry catsup may taste good, part of its reason for existence has disappeared, and so the catsup itself has also disappeared.