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Chili Sauce (Take nine large tomatoes four)
Take nine large tomatoes, four large onions, four red peppers, or in the same proportion. Chop them together; then add four cups of vinegar, three tablespoonfuls of sugar, two of salt, two teaspoonfuls of cloves, the same of cinnamon, ground, of ginger, of allspice and of nutmeg. Boil one hour, and bottle for use.
XII. Flavored Vinegar.
A chunky, spiced tomato condiment of the ketchup family, thickened by an hour of open boiling rather than by any thickener. The proportions are sound; the only real gaps are vessel size, vinegar strength and what to do once it is in the jar.
- Storage is the weak point"Bottle for use" assumes a cellar and daily use. Treat it as a refrigerator condiment and keep it no more than a month, or follow a current tested chili-sauce recipe if you want it shelf-stable — this one gives no jar size, headspace or processing time.
- Scale and yieldNine large tomatoes is roughly 4 to 4.5 lb. After an hour of boiling expect somewhere in the region of 3 pints, though the exact yield depends on how hard you reduce it.
- Vinegar strengthNineteenth-century household vinegar varied; modern distilled white or cider vinegar at 5 percent acidity is the right substitute. Four cups is a lot of liquid, which is why the hour of open boiling matters.
- "Four red peppers"Ambiguous. The term could mean either ripe sweet peppers, with the heat coming from the spices, or hot red pods; if you read it as four fresh cayennes the sauce becomes very hot. Start with sweet peppers and add one hot pepper if you want bite.
- The spicing is heavyTwo teaspoons each of clove, cinnamon, ginger, allspice and nutmeg in one batch is assertive by current taste, and clove in particular dominates. Halving the clove and nutmeg gives a sauce closer to what most palates now expect.
- Chop, do not puréeThe character of chili sauce as distinct from ketchup is visible pieces of tomato, onion and pepper. Hand-chop or pulse briefly; a blender gives you a smooth sauce closer to ketchup.
- Boil uncovered, and stirThe hour is a reduction, so leave the pan open and use a wide heavy pot. Once it thickens it catches on the bottom quickly — stir through the last twenty minutes.
- PeelingThe original does not say to skin the tomatoes, and the skins will curl into unpleasant threads. A thirty-second blanch and a cold dip makes them slip off.
Chili sauce in American cookery of this period has little to do with the chile-based sauces of Mexico and the Southwest; it is a spiced, vinegared tomato relish, the coarse-textured cousin of the bottled ketchup that was then moving from the kitchen to the factory. Recipes of this shape — peppers, vinegar, sugar, and a battery of sweet spices boiled down together — appear in dozens of late nineteenth-century community and household books with only the spice ratios shifting. The name is generally traced to the peppers rather than to any Mexican original. It belongs with the other preserving recipes of a household with more ripe tomatoes than it could eat, where vinegar, sugar and spice were the tools for carrying the garden into winter. The stray "XII. Flavored Vinegar" at the end is a printer's catchline for the next entry, not part of the recipe.