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Chili Sauce (Mrs Charles Lester Three large)
-Mrs. Charles Lester Three large green peppers.
Half cup sugar.
One tablespoonful salt.
Half tablespoonful black pepper.
Three large onions.
One teacup vinegar, Chop ali fine and cook over a slow fire for three hours.
A short, blunt relish recipe of the kind that was written down for someone who already knew what chili sauce looked like. The transcription is incomplete in one important way, so read the first point before shopping.
- The missing tomatoesNearly every American chili sauce of this era is built on ripe tomatoes, so this ingredient list may well be incomplete. (The "Three large" in the title is just the opening words of the text, not evidence of a dropped line.) As printed, this is a pepper-and-onion relish with no bulk and no liquid beyond a cup of vinegar; if you want something closer to the usual sauce, a dozen or so large ripe tomatoes, peeled and chopped, would be in keeping with comparable printed recipes — but that figure is a guess, not in the original.
- A teacupPeriod American cookbooks often reckon a teacup at about three-quarters of a cup rather than a full measuring cup, though usage varied from book to book and this recipe gives no equivalence.
- Slow fireThe lowest steady simmer you can hold, with the pan uncovered so moisture leaves. On a modern burner that is low heat, and it will still want stirring every fifteen minutes or so near the end, when the sugar makes scorching likely.
- Three hours is realWith tomatoes in the pan, three hours is what it takes to reduce them to a thick, dark, spoonable sauce. Without tomatoes, three hours will simply burn a cup of chopped peppers and onions — another sign the ingredient list is short.
- Green peppers, not chiles"Green peppers" in this period usually means sweet bell peppers. In this recipe the heat comes from the black pepper and the vinegar rather than from capsicum, though other period chili sauces do call for cayenne or hot pepper; add cayenne only if you want it hotter than intended.
- Chop all fineThe recipe asks for everything chopped fine; done by hand that still leaves distinct pieces rather than a purée. A food processor will turn the onions to slurry and the finished sauce will be closer to ketchup.
- Yield and keepingAs printed this makes well under a pint; adding tomatoes would multiply that, depending how many. The recipe gives no sealing or processing instructions, so treat it as a fresh relish: refrigerate in a clean jar and use within two or three weeks. For shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested tomato-relish canning procedure rather than this one.
- ServingSharp, sweet and salty at once. It belongs beside cold roast meat, sausages, beans or a fried egg, in tablespoon quantities.
Chili sauce in the American sense has little to do with chile peppers: it is a spiced, sweetened, vinegared tomato relish, a cousin of ketchup that was left chunky instead of strained. It became a fixture of home preserving in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the late-summer glut of tomatoes, onions and sweet peppers all arrived at once and vinegar and sugar were the cheapest way to hold them. Community and club cookbooks like this one collected such recipes by contributor name, and the entries are often skeletal because the compiler assumed every reader had made the dish before — hence a list of seasonings, a cooking time, and not a word about jars, headspace or how thick is thick enough.