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Chili Sauce (Mrs James Short)
-Mrs. James Short.
Nine large ripe tomatoes (peeled).
Two small green peppers.
Three onions.
Two cups vinegar.
Two tablespoonfuls sugar.
One tablespoonful salt.
Ginger, mustard, cloves and nutmeg to taste. Boil twenty minutes. Twelve large tomatoes.
A community-cookbook chili sauce: a chunky, sweet-sour tomato relish rather than anything hot. The proportions are sound, but the timing and the stray final line both need interpretation.
- Twenty minutes is not enoughBoiled for twenty minutes the mixture will still be watery and taste raw and sharp. Chili sauce of this type is normally cooked down uncovered for 45 minutes to 2 hours, until it mounds on a spoon and a track drawn across the pan bottom holds for a second. Stir often near the end; the sugar catches easily.
- That last line"Twelve large tomatoes" appears after the method with no explanation. It is most likely a printer's fragment or an alternate proportion for a larger batch. Work from the nine tomatoes in the ingredient list and ignore it.
- How many tomatoesNine large ripe tomatoes is roughly 3 to 3 1/2 lb, or something over 6 cups chopped after peeling. Peel by scoring the skins and dropping them in boiling water for 30 seconds, then into cold water. Paste tomatoes will reduce faster than slicing tomatoes.
- Green peppers, not chilesIn American cookbooks of this period a "green pepper" means a sweet bell-type pepper. The heat in old chili sauce comes from the spices, not from capsicum. If you want warmth, that is a departure from the original.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold vinegar of this era was variable in strength and not standardised as it is now. Two cups of modern 5 percent cider vinegar against 3 lb of tomatoes gives a distinctly sharp sauce; taste as it reduces and add sugar if it needs balancing.
- Spices to tasteFor this quantity, a reasonable starting point is 1 teaspoon each of ground ginger and dry mustard and 1/2 teaspoon each of ground cloves and nutmeg. Cloves dominate quickly, so add them last and in small increments.
- StorageThe recipe gives no canning directions, and it should not be treated as a canning recipe. Keep it in the refrigerator, where it holds two to three weeks, or freeze it. For shelf-stable jars, use a current tested chili sauce recipe with measured acidity and a specified process time.
- YieldExpect about 3 cups once properly reduced, about a pint and a half. It is a condiment for cold meat, meatloaf, beans or eggs, served by the spoonful.
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American "chili sauce" is a tomato relish, not a Mexican chile sauce: cooked tomatoes, onion, sweet pepper, vinegar, sugar and warm baking spices, left deliberately chunky where ketchup was strained smooth. It belongs to the great late-summer preserving push, when a household faced more ripe tomatoes than it could eat and turned them into catsups, chow-chows and sauces to carry through winter. The attribution to Mrs. James Short is typical of the subscription and church cookbooks of the era, which were assembled from members' own kitchen slips: the seasoning left "to taste," and the orphaned line of tomatoes at the end that no editor caught.