Catsup for Do-It-Yourselfers

I love to cook.  I love to read about cooking and watch cooking shows.  Not the cable ones devoted to minting and merchandising celebu-chefs.  Not the ones whose stars facilitate cooking wars and abuse masochistic amateur chefs.  Nay, I love the cooking shows on public television.

The PBS chefs are my kitchen idols.  They are all about teaching technique and the chemistry of ingredients, and they are so passionate about what they do that they don't really need audiences.  They make you fall in love with the food they love.  Lidia Bastianich.  Ming Tsai.  Rick Bayless's Mexico, One Plate at a Time and America's Test Kitchen are my porn. 

If you love to cook and love to feed others what you prepare, then you probably read cookbooks for the pure pleasure of it, too.  Your heart skips a beat when you come across a cookbook that beckons you with its siren call from a bargain table in an out-of-the way store.  "Buy me.  I'm 75% off, and I contain recipes cherished and shared by church ladies in Chicken Paw, Delaware.  Caress my pages.  Kiss me.  Let me fatten you up for the holidays."

Recently, I discovered a small cookbook crafted by an author who had inherited her Amish grandmother's old wooden recipe box.  Interspersed with the recipes she tested and put in the book are little commentaries, memories of childhood among the Plain People.  It's sweet reading and, if you didn't already know that the Amish work their tails off all day in fields and factories, you'd be inclined to wonder why they aren't all the size of a healthy rhinoceros.

Anyway, since I came home from the local farmers' market this morning lugging a pile of finally-in-season Jersey tomatoes, (there are no words adequate to describe the perfection of a New Jersey-grown tomato) I sat down to flip through some recipes for possible use for the ones that actually made it out of the car without being eaten.

I do believe this one, from the Amish cookbook, to be the most interesting yet:

Catsup

1/2 bushel tomatoes
1/2 cup vinegar
1/3 cup salt
1 cup sugar
1 tablespoon cinnamon
1/2 tablespoon pepper

Boil tomatoes with skins on, then rub them through a window screen.  Add remaining ingredients and simmer for 45 minutes.

See, I might have used a basketball net, because you could just throw that in the washer.  But this seems a lot more precise.  For safety's sake, not to mention convenience, I would use a first floor window.  And put something on the floor or outside on the lawn to catch the tomato flesh, right?