Anyone who grew up in the United States was likely taught the apocryphal story of the child George Washington who chopped down a cherry tree, and when confronted by his father, he confessed “I cannot tell a lie. I chopped it down with my little hatchet.” While this childhood lesson of honesty is undoubtedly a myth, it is true that Washington was something of a cherry fanatic.

There is little doubt that Martha and her household were capable of making the grandest of cuisines. But her husband grew up in relative poverty, and never grew accustomed to the fancier foreign foods served at wealthier estates. Future presidents like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had distinctly French tastes in food and wine. If you are what you eat, Washington was a Virginian, through and through. The Mount Vernon estate where the Washingtons lived was entirely self sufficient, producing all the food and beverage they would need for the year, with the remainder sold to market.

The Washingtons did not have children together, but Martha had four children with her first husband. According to her grandson Custis, the first president “ate heartily, but was not particular in his diet, with the exception of fish, of which he was excessively fond. He partook sparingly of dessert, drank a home-made beverage, and from four to five glasses of Madeira wine.”

We are remarkably fortunate that the family cookbook survived all these years. It likely dates to the 17th century, and many of the recipes are English – her mother being of English and Welsh decent. Martha received the cookbook in 1749 on the occasion of her first marriage to Daniel Custis at the age of 18. Custis was a wealthy farmer and land owner twenty years her senior, who died when Martha was 25. Widowed and wealthy, she married General Washington at 27 in a lavish ceremony and became Lady Martha Custis Washington. She had and used the cookbook for much of her life until 1799 when she passed it along to her only granddaughter Eleanor Parke Custis when the young girl married Lawrence Lewis. The manuscript has since been printed in various editions, most notably by Karen Hess who edited and annotated the collection.

TIPS AND TRICKS

You can leave the cherries whole or pit them. Personally, I prefer to pit them first so they don’t have to be dealt with later.

If you happen to have a long-handled metal spoon, so much the better. Otherwise, a regular spoon will be fine – just be careful you don’t burn yourself scraping the foam from the edges of the pan.

If you do plan on keeping these cherries for some time, I would recommend pressure canning them for safety. Granted, this is not what the Washingtons would have done, but then again there were quite a lot of food-borne illnesses back then too. Save yourself the botulism and pressure can them, or eat them within a few weeks and keep it in the refrigerator.

THE TAKE-AWAY

Before refrigeration and pressure cookers, you pickled, salted, or sugared your foods to preserve them. This recipe for preserved cherries is simple and exemplifies the technique. Though home preserving has diminished in the age of canned goods, you still often see fruit canned in syrup. This homemade version using sugar is leaps and bounds better than the stuff you buy steeped in high fructose corn syrup.

As you can imagine, the end result is remarkably sweet. These cherries would likely have been eaten by themselves, but you could also use them for the base of a cherry pie or as a topping for ice cream or shortcake. You can bring some tartness back to them by adding a squeeze of fresh lemon juice. The remaining syrup could also be used as a flavoring to club soda or cocktails.

Like most recipes prior to the 20th century, the instructions are brief and assume basic knowledge of the cook. As such, I offer a more detailed version after presenting the original.

“To Preserue Cheries” from Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery and Booke of Sweetmeats (1749), Transcribed by Karen Hess, New York: Columbia University Press (1996)

Take 2 pound of faire cherries & clip of the stalks in ye midst. then wash them clean, but bruise them not. then take 2 pound of double refined sugar, & set it over ye fire with a quart of faire water in ye broadest preserving pan or silver basen as you can get. Let it seeth till it be some what thick, yn put in yr cherries, & let them boyle. keepe allwayes scumming & turning them gently with a silver spoon till they be enough. when they are cold, you may glass them up & keep them all the year.

ADAPTATION:

2 lbs of fresh cherries, stemmed
2 lbs sugar (4 cups)
1 quart water (4 cups)

Wash cherries, and pit them if desired. In a large saucepan or pot, make a syrup by adding sugar to boiling water. When sugar is completely dissolved, add cherries to the pot and return to a boil. Using a metal spoon, stir occasionally and remove as much foam that appears as possible. When cherries are soft and liquid has been reduced by about half, remove from heat and let cool.

I’m reminded of that classic 1944 Vincent Minelli movie-musical, Meet Me in St. Louis with Judy Garland, when the family cook is slaving away in the kitchen over a large pot of ketchup. Before pouring the thin liquid into individual bottles, each member of the family tastes it, and each one inevitably gives a differing opinion – too sweet, too spicy, too thick, etc.

With summer in full-swing, I couldn’t resist attempting this most classic of American condiments.

Believe it or not, though, ketchup is not American. Or European. It actually has its roots in the fermented and pickled sauces of Chinese cuisine. The term ke-tsiap originally refers to a kind of pickled fish sauce.

The term spread around the world through the trade routes of the 17th and 18th century, and was applied to most sour sauces that had nuts, fish, vegetables or fruit as its base.

British Colonists grew tomatoes as ornamental plants, believing the fruit was poisonous, though legend has it that Thomas Jefferson was introduced to tomatoes on a visit to Paris, and liking them so much, he had seeds sent back home.

Tomato ketchup recipes appear in the earliest of American cookbooks including one in Mary Randolph’s classic The Virginia Housewife (1824). However, it wasn’t until 1876, when F. & J. Heinz launched their brand of bottled tomato ketchup that the condiment achieved cult status.

Why? Because it was a challenge to make at home. It takes quite a bit of time, and the bottling process didn’t always prevent spoilage. Heinz tackled this challenge by adding more vinegar – basically pickling the tomatoes – and guarenteeing the lack of spoilage of their product by offering a money-back refund. Today, Heinz is the world’s leading producer of tomato ketchup, with the bulk of it bottled and produced in my home state of Ohio at a plant in Fremont.

The thick tomato ketchup we’re all so used to is a relatively recent change, as the recipe below proves. Tomatoes used in ketchup had less pectin, and were often picked unripe. More recently, industrially made ketchups have more pectin added, or sometimes even a thickener like corn syrup or corn starch.

The recipe below is makes a much thinner, much tarter ketchup than what you’ll find in the store. The spices also offer a savory flavor that contemporary ketchups lack – a flavor that makes it the perfect pairing for meats and vegetables, or to give a bit of a boost to sauces and stocks.

So, if you’re expecting a ketchup that can easily be scooped by a French fry, skip it and reach for the Heinz. However, if you’re looking for an uncommon condiment that’s versatile with any number of dishes, I highly recommend giving this a try.

TIPS AND TRICKS
This comes from Marion Harland’s 1871 tome Common Sense in the Household: A Manual of Practical Housewifery. Harland includes an entire chapter on “Catsups and Flavored Vinegars,” including receipts for lemon catsup, mushroom catsup, oyster catsup and walnut catsup. Yep. Future blog posts right there.

This recipe does take a bit of time and attention to make. Regardless of the pot you use, there will be a tendency for the tomato sauce to burn as more of the water evaporates. There is a substantial amount of time spent stirring. Finally, note that the vinegar is added at the end to the chilled sauce and then not reheated. Add the vinegar to taste, and do try it before you start doctoring it up with sugar and such.

If you don’t want to go through all the trouble of cooking down tomatoes and straining them, you could start with a large can of tomato juice. Of course, if you really want to cheat, start with a can of tomato sauce. If you go this far, though, you might as well by the ready-made ketchups.

My notes are in [brackets].

1 peck ripe tomatoes [about 17 medium tomatoes]
1 ounce salt
1 ounce mace [mace is the hull of nutmeg. Ground nutmeg can be used in a pinch]
1 table spoonful black pepper
1 teaspoonful cayenne
1 tablespoonful cloves (powdered)
7 tablespoonfuls ground mustard
1 tablespoonful celery seed (tied in a thin muslin bag)
[1 pint vinegar]

Cut a slit in the tomatoes, put into a bell-metal or porcelain kettle [any thick bottomed pot should do], and boil until the juice is all extracted and the pulp dissolved. Strain and press through a cullender, then through a hair sieve. Return to the fire, add the seasoning, and boil at least five hours, stirring constantly for the last hour, and frequently throughout the time it is on the fire. Let it stand twelve hours in a stone jar on the cellar floor [or cool on the stove to room temperature, then at least two hours in the refrigerator]. When cold, add a pint of strong vinegar [white distilled is fine, but cider vinegar can also be used, particularly for the gluten intolerant]. Take out the bag of celery seed, and bottle, sealing the corks. Keep in a dark, cool place.

Few things remind me of autumn more than apple butter – that creamy, slightly spicy fruit spread thick as butter. Apple butter is a great way of using up a large amount of harvest apples at one time. Canned in a hot water bath, these will keep at least a year (but who could possibly have tasty apple butter lying around that long?). There are countless uses for apple butter, whether the classic spread on a piece of toast, or add some cracked black pepper and serve it hot as a savory sauce for a pork roast.

I love this recipe for Apple butter, which comes from the Hancock Shaker Village in western Massachusetts. The recipe dates to about 1871, and embodies the Shaker’s utopian philosophy of food:

   We’re willing to state-
Eat hearty and decent,
And clear out our plate –
Be thankful to heaven –
For what we receive,
And not make a mixture
or compound to leave

We find of those bounties
Which heaven doth give,
That some live to eat,
And, that some eat to live –
That some think of nothing
But pleasing the taste,
And care very little
How much they do waste.
Our Shaker Home, 1830

Their recipe for apple butter is close to perfection, is simple in both ingredients and production, and wastes as little of the apple as possible – apples are roughly chopped with core and peel removed only after cooking. Also, in a gesture towards self-sufficiency and sustainability, this recipe uses Shaker Boiled Cider as a sweetener, rather than imported sugar from the Caribbean. The Shaker’s raised some of the funds for their communities by bottling and selling their boiled cider as a domestic sweetener, and can be used in all kinds of recipes as a sugar substitute. This apple butter is plenty sweet enough without adding sugar, and the limited use of spice (allspice only, rather than cinnamon, nutmeg and ground cloves) allows the apples to remain the star of this sauce. I’m a big fan of Shaker cooking, and you’ll likely see many of their recipes appear here in the future.

5 pounds cooking apples, cut up but not peeled or cored
1 gallon fresh apple cider
1 tbsp allspice

The first step is to make Shaker Boiled Cider. Sister Mary Whitcher’s recipe is succinct: “Take 4 gallons of cider and boil it to one gallon.” Here, not needing quite so much or quite so syrupy of a sweetner, take one gallon of fresh cider, and boil it down to a half gallon. The result should be a strong, sweet reduction that is still thin – not syrupy.

In a large enameled dutch oven or heavy-bottomed stock pot, add apples (five pounds is roughly fifteen medium-sized apples) and cover with boiled cider. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer.  Stir frequently to avoid burning the apples. This process loosens all the usable apple pulp from the hard core, seeds and peel.

Remove from fire. Using a fine mesh strainer and wooden spoon, gradually push as much pulp through to a new pot as possible. The pulp should resemble a thick red applesauce. Undesirable apple parts will remain in strainer. In Shaker tradition, don’t just pitch this – compost it, or if you are lucky enough to have pigs or farm animals, feed to them. This step takes awhile, and is a great task to give to a child if you have one around. Not only will it get the task done, it will encourage them to cook later in life.

Return the strained pulp to the stove and bring to a simmer. Stir constantly until pulp breaks down further, darkens to an amber brown, and is of a thick enough consistency that if you drop a bit onto a spoon or plate, it will pile instead of spreading out. When it reaches the right consistency, stir-in allspice to your taste.

This recipe makes roughly two quarts. Can immediately to preserve for the year. Otherwise, store in a tightly sealed container in the fridge for around a week. Plan to make this at least a day before using – the flavor changes for the better the day after cooking.