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Chili Sauce (Eight tablespconfuls sugar)
Eight tablespconfuls sugar.
Eight tablespoonfuls of salt.
One tablespoonful cinnamon.
One tablespoonful allspice.
One tablespoonful cloves.
One tablespoonful nutmeg.
Boil all together well, and seal while bot. Superior to tomato catsup.
This entry is a fragment. What survives is only the seasoning half of a chili sauce, and the one instruction it does give — seal while hot — is the method that modern canning guidance specifically abandoned.
- The base is missingA period chili sauce is built on peeled ripe tomatoes with onion, sweet and hot peppers, and vinegar. None of those appear here, nor any quantity for them. There is no way to know what volume these eight tablespoons of sugar and eight of salt were meant to season.
- Open-kettle sealing"Seal while hot" means pouring boiling sauce into jars and screwing the lids down with no processing afterward. The vacuum it produces is unreliable and nothing sterilises the jar rim or the underside of the lid. This practice is no longer considered safe for any tomato product.
- The specific hazardTomatoes sit near the borderline of pH 4.6, and some varieties test above it, which is why tested recipes require added acid. Add onion and pepper -- both low-acid -- and an unprocessed sealed jar becomes a plausible environment for Clostridium botulinum, which may give little or no warning by smell, gas or off flavour.
- Unmeasurable acidEven if the vinegar had been listed, period vinegar strength varied and was rarely stated. Safe home canning of a tomato relish depends on a known acid ratio and a timed water-bath process, neither of which can be reconstructed from this text.
- Typographic damage"tablespconfuls" and "seal while bot" are garbled readings of "tablespoonfuls" and "seal while hot," left as they appear in the text.
- If you want the dishUse a current tested recipe for tomato chili sauce with specified vinegar strength and water-bath times. The old spice ratio here — cinnamon, allspice, cloves and nutmeg in equal measure — is the interesting part and is worth reading, not following.
American chili sauce of this period has little to do with Mexican salsa de chile. It was a thick, sweet-sour spiced tomato relish, chopped rather than strained, and it stood as the household rival to bottled tomato catsup -- hence the flat closing boast, "Superior to tomato catsup." Commercial catsup was widely sold by the 1890s, and by the early 1900s its preservatives were the subject of public controversy, which gave home versions their appeal. The warm-spice quartet of cinnamon, allspice, cloves and nutmeg is common in nineteenth-century Anglo-American preserving, the same cabinet that flavoured mincemeat and spiced fruit; chile heat, when present at all, came from a few chopped red peppers and was a minor note rather than the point.