"enigma" in :>

[After describing making tomato catsup regularly]

> the original American catsups were commonly Concord grape based.

Do you have a source or reference for the originals being grape based? I'm
interested. As I've been posting here, by the early 1800s a variety of
catsup recipes were in use. Both Eliza Leslie and Mary Randolph's books
from that time (I'm looking at Randolph's book as I type this) gave recipes
for tomato catsup/catchup. (The 20th-century Fannie Farmer cookbooks that I
mentioned in the original posting have recipes for grape catsups, by the
way.)

> tomato based catsups were unheard of until the late 1800s when it was
> discovered that tomatoes were not just ornamental, but actually edible.

I believe you must mean "until the 1700s." That's the era the 1988
_Larousse Gastronomique_ gives for European recognition of tomato edibility.
That reference book mentions its import from Peru to Spain in the 1500s,
remaining an ornamental plant, presumed poisonous, until the 1700s. Adding
also that tomatoes are diuretic, laxative, and refreshing.

More colorful, and earlier, is the parallel history of the potato's rise to
respectability. An earlier edition of the same reference book describes
various oppositions to it. Including a 1630 ban on cultivating potatoes by
the Parliament of Besançon, "from fear of leprosy."