My niece, Kirsten, spent a lot of time with my mother and learned to make Tomato Catsup from her. She and her sister, Elizabeth, are now carrying this recipe forward to glory and it is a big seller at the annual Trinity Christmas Bazaar in Columbia. I never did it because my mother always made it in August when the last tomatoes were still on the vines and the temperature was in the high and soggy nineties. She usually undertook this task with my aunt Ellie in the kitchen on Edisto. This wasn’t a requirement – it could be made in other places – but that’s mostly where it happened.
    Tomatoes have been grown on Edisto in quantity since the boll weevil infestation of the early twentieth century. The soil is right and the fruit does well in the hot, humid fields.  I think I have heard that corn needs high nighttime temperatures to finish. I don’t know that tomatoes are partial to that, but that’s what they get on Edisto.
    There aren’t so many farmers planting tomatoes this year because no one knows if there will be the necessary hand labor to pick them. This labor shortage has been worsening for the last couple of years with all the shouting and carrying on about illegal aliens, the very people who pick the tomatoes. No illegals, no tomato crops on Edisto. It’s a back-breaking seasonal job and the only thing as bad as an outright crop failure is not being able to harvest a crop, not being able to clear the fields and having to let it all decay on the vine.
    Commercially grown tomatoes are planted by the first migrant crews to come through. They roll out the plastic and set the stakes and plant the little tomatoes. The farmer can keep up with the field while they grow because the weeds are starved for light by the plastic and sprayers can handle the bugs, but the tomatoes have to be hand picked.
     A couple of people can keep working through the fields tying them to the stakes as the tomatoes grow. The second crew does the picking, but immediately moves on and up the coast picking tomatoes as they ripen in the warming climate.
    Another crew, a third crew, comes along and takes the fields apart, cuts down the vines, pulls and stacks the stakes and rolls up the plastic. This is all hard hand labor, but each stage needs intensive labor for only a week or so. A couple of locals can take some of the tomatoes out that the picking crew doesn’t get and these can be sold locally before the vines are destroyed by the final crew a couple of weeks or a month later.
    To make matters worse for SC tomato growers, the Florida growers have developed a tomato with the ability to keep producing even when that state is boiling so there is less national demand for tomatoes from Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia and so on up the coast.
    The modern commercial tomato plant is different from the one we used to plant in our fields. Modern tomatoes grow up stakes and reach as high as a man’s chest, but old style plants were more earth bound barely rising up to an adult’s waist. Harvesting was stop labor then. When it was time to make the catsup my mother, my aunt and I – if I happened to be there and didn’t see it coming – would go out to one of the fields in the “cool” of the morning and pick a couple of bushels of ripe tomatoes. This is a chore that one cannot appreciate by harvesting a row of home growns or a few window boxes. It is hot and the sun is up like a broiler and the heat is radiating out of the soil and the bugs are aggressive and they’re serious and the dust rises up with every step.
    Once the tomatoes were picked and brought back to the house, the process would begin. Like I said, I never did it, but I have vivid memories of it being done. The tomatoes were washed and cut up. Skins were NEVER removed. They were put into a large pot, a pot big enough to require the business end of a broken oar to stir. It was even hotter in the kitchen than the fields even with the fans grinding away. It smells like the high school basketball team’s sneakers are being boiled times ten.
    The cooks were aided by the liberal consumption of vodka and water on ice. It is a wonder no one fell into the pot. 
    It seemed to take all day and I am sure it did by the time the fruit was cooked down, properly seasoned and poured into an entire year’s worth of saved glass bottles. The catsup could come to one in a Smirnov bottle or a Heinz ketchup bottle or a cranberry juice bottle, vinegar bottle… anything really. It wasn’t very thick and it had no sugar at all. It is – I do not say was because I still have some  - very vinegary. It just can’t deteriorate with all that vinegar. We use it for barbeque sauce (it’s really good on chicken, but will do well on pork, too)
    There are many catsup recipes and many spellings, too. As a child I couldn’t reconcile what my mother made with Heinz or any of the other red, sugary stuff. This stuff wasn’t red like a fire truck; it was brown like the rust on a red fire truck. My child has the same issue with it, but he eats it on burgers and has come to appreciate it with fries.
    My brother submitted the following pared down recipe to the Edisto Island, Trinity Episcopal Church cookbook, ‘Pon Top Edisto and I see, upon checking Charleston Receipts that it is lifted verbatim from that book.


    Mama worked in much larger quantities* and I think she most likely added some other ingredients. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were some little onion in there as well as a bit of bell pepper. She was a creative cook and liked bell peppers. 

And there was vodka involved.

* Kirsten says this is the recipe they used alright, but that they made it in quantities four times as great and sometime greater. It is a once a year thing and you may as well do a lot of it when you do it. As noted, it keeps.