Easy Home-Made Tomato Ketchup

I used to despair about how much tomato sauce my kids ate until I read that it contains lashings of lycopene, a powerful antioxidant (these days I squeeze it down their throats while holding their noses). I joke, of course, but we do eat an awful lot of tomatoes in this house, mainly because of my addiction to tomato soup, which still shows no signs of abating.

I bought a lovely big box of tomatoes yesterday and decided to try my hand at home-made ketchup. I approached this recipe with some trepidation, because I didn't think it would taste the same as shop sauce, but I needn't have worried: it not only tastes exactly like ketchup; it tastes better. I love a recipe that delivers on its promises, and this recipe does - in dollops. The spice combination is spot on.

It's adapted from Preserved, by Nick Sandler and Johnny Acton. If you're into drying, salting, smoking, pickling and bottling, I can highly recommend this brilliant and inspiring book.

I was particularly impressed to see that the first recipe in the book is for our beloved South African delicacy biltong: 'Mention to biltong to émigré South Africans and their eyes will start to water with nostalgia,' they write. 'Dark, chewy, and frankly pretty tough, this air-dried, spiced meat is an acquired taste, but once acquired it is never forgotten. Americans already have a head start through their predilection for beef jerky, but never make the mistake of comparing the two in the presence of a South African!'


Easy Home-Made Tomato Ketchup

3 and 1/2 kg ripe, juicy tomatoes
4 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced
1 cup (250 ml) vinegar (I used half malt vinegar, and half white wine vinegar)
10 whole cloves
4 cardamom pods, lightly crushed
1/2 t (2.5 ml) white pepper
1/2 t (2.5 ml) ground black pepper
1/2 t (2.5 ml) ground mace (use nutmeg if you can't find mace)
1/2 t (2.5 ml) ground allspice
1/2 t (2.5 ml) ground cinnamon
2 t (10 ml) paprika
1/2 cup (125 ml) white sugar
2 t (10 ml) salt

Remove the stalk 'scar' from the tomatoes using a sharp knife or apple corer, but don't peel them. Cut them in quarters and feed them through the tube of a food processor fitted with a metal blade, together with the garlic. Process to a chunky mush. (If you don't have a food processor, roughly chop the tomatoes into 1-cm sized pieces). Put the cloves and cardamom pods onto a little square of muslin or cloth and tie in a bundle, like a bouquet garni. Place the bundle into a deep preserving pot or a thick-based pan and add the tomato pulp and all remaining ingredients. Mix well, bring to the boil, then turn down the heat and cook gently, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking, until the mixture has reduced by a third, or is slightly thickened.

This will take about two hours. Remove the spice bag, allow the sauce to cool slightly, and then whizz to a rough purée in your food processor. Pour the purée back into the pan and bring to the boil. In the meantime, sterilise four jars (about 25o ml each) and their lids (or wide-mouthed bottles if you have them). Pour the boiling sauce into the jars, filling to within a few millimetres of the rim. Screw on the lids tightly, and tighten again after half an hour hour.

I suppose you could sieve this sauce if you wanted a really smooth ketchup.

The authors of Preserved recommend that you store the sauce for eight to ten months before you eat it, but I don't think I can wait that long. Keep in the fridge after opening.

Makes 4 jars.

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Cream horns, Hitler, Mrs Wicks, and the joy of the vintage cookbook

I bet you've never heard of Mrs Wicks. Well, neither had I, until yesterday, when I bought her cookbook, issued in 1939 by the Shell Company of South Africa. I was thrilled to add it to my small but growing collection of South African cookbooks and food manufacturers' pamphlets from the thirties, forties, fifties and sixties, and even more delighted when I found several handwritten recipes and old war-time cuttings** pasted on the inside covers of the book.

Finding any hand-penned recipe tucked between the pages of a vintage cookbook, or written on its end-papers, tickles me pink.

Old, dog-eared, cake-batter-flecked books like this appeal to me for many reasons. The first is purely visual: their covers and illustrations are so enchanting and innocent, in a mid-century kind of way. Even the photographs, which are generally frightfully ugly - especially when they involve jellied savoury rings and stuffed eggs, with their piped-on, turdy toppings - have a peculiar appeal. But, most important of all, I appreciate these books for the fascinating historical documents they are.

They reflect so much of the last century's attitude to women as domestic goddesses and aproned, lipsticked home-makers. Read in this light, they are sometimes heart-breaking. Cookbooks of this era often contain little poems and homilies about how to show docility and consideration towards one's husband. A few of them - and particularly South African vintage cookbooks - lament the 'servant problem', making comments about their servants that make my cheeks burn with indignation and shame.

But the overriding value of these little books is the brilliant recipes they contain. Not all the recipes, mind you. The war-time recipes, which reflect the hardships of rationing, make dismal reading, with their scrag ends and powdered eggs and outer cabbage leaves. Kitschy recipes of the sixties and seventies, involving a lot of jelly powder, Ideal evaporated milk, tinned fruit and stuffed eggs, are not inspiring. But scattered all over these books, and especially in the cakes, bakes and preserves sections - which generally make up half of every cook book published before 1960; goodness, but our grandmothers loved cake - are many wonderful old recipes that quite obviously have been passed down from mother to daughter over countless generations.

Gingerbread, ginger beer, Boston Loaf, Sussex Pond Pudding, Queen's pudding, fruit cakes and puddings and pies, syllabub, and a host of old South African recipes such as bredies, koeksisters, Hertzoggies, samoosas, biltong, mampoer, boerewors, pickled fish, melktert... the list goes on and on.

These recipes, some of which are many centuries old, are becoming an endangered species as the culinary landscape is flooded with squid ink and fish sauce and Balsamic vinegar and horrid towers of cheffy saffron-this and cardamom-that.

I started collecting mid-twentieth-century cookbooks about two years ago, when I grabbed an old sixties cookbook my mother was turfing out. I flipped through it with the scornful attitude of one who reads glossy food magazines, and was about to turf it into the don't-want pile, when I came across a photograph of a rabbit-shaped white cake coated in coconut flakes, and, a few pages on, a ghastly - and frankly rather pornographic - picture of a pastry horn overflowing with whipped cream. Both pictures evoked the most extraordinary response: I was transported in an instant back to 1967, and could feel myself standing on a chair on chubby toddler legs in our family kitchen, poring over the very same cookbook, and wishing my mom would make rabbit cake and cream horns for pud. I could hear the low hiss of our gas stove, smell the comforting whiffs of potato-topped fish pie baking in the oven, hear the buzzing of fat flies trapped in the sticky, curling yellow fly-strip hanging from the kitchen ceiling. A petrified knot of neurons in my forty-something old brain unbundled themselves, and along came a flood of memories of my childhood. Reading these old books and pamphlets is like tasting memories; like burying my nose in my mom's floury apron.


** One of the war-time cuttings reads:

SEND HIM A CAKE. Here is the way to make it yourself.

The way to a man's heart.... that applies more than ever before nowadays. Here's a recipe we know will please him. [I am going to try this recipe out, along with the Cinnamon Loaf, written by Mrs Evans of Germiston, South Africa, in 1940, picture left, in the next few days, so please check back soon]

And, on the flip-side of the cutting, the news that Hitler received at his headquarters the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Horthy, who later returned to Budapest. Print Friendly