Chili Sauce
2 dozen ripe tomatoes. 1 dozen onions finely chopped. 1 dozen peppers finely chopped.
Third Sunaay 1 cup brown sugar. 4 cups cider vinegar. 4 tablespoons salt.
PROCESS: Scald, peel and chop tomatoes; then add remaining ingredients in the order given. Place on range, bring to boiling point and cook slowly until thick. Add more salt and sugar if necessary. Turn into sterilized fruit jars, seal and store. Serve with meats, fish, etc.
This is a classic open-kettle preserving recipe, and that is precisely the problem: it seals a low-acid vegetable mixture in jars with no measured processing at all. The notes below explain the specific failures rather than offering a fix.
- No processing step"Turn into sterilized fruit jars, seal and store" is open-kettle canning, abandoned by preserving authorities decades ago. Hot sauce poured into hot jars will often pull a vacuum and look sealed, but nothing guarantees the headspace and lid surfaces reach a temperature that destroys contaminants introduced during filling.
- Botulism is the specific riskOnions and sweet peppers are low-acid foods, and here they make up a substantial share of the solids. Sealed in a jar and stored at room temperature, an under-acidified tomato-onion-pepper mixture is an anaerobic environment in which Clostridium botulinum can grow. The toxin gives no smell, no bubbling and no off taste.
- The acid is not measured against the loadFour cups of vinegar sounds generous until you set it against two dozen tomatoes plus two dozen chopped vegetables cooked down to an unspecified thickness. Tested modern relish recipes fix the quantities and specify vinegar of at least 5 per cent acidity; this one leaves the balance to the eye.
- Modern tomatoes are not the 1913 tomatoesModern tomatoes and acidification -- Tomato pH sits close to the safety threshold and varies by cultivar and ripeness, which is why current tomato canning directions call for added bottled lemon juice or citric acid at a stated rate per jar. Nothing in this recipe compensates for that.
- "1 dozen peppers" is meaningless as a quantityA dozen small hot peppers and a dozen large bell peppers differ by an order of magnitude in weight and enormously in heat. Recipes intended for shelf storage specify peppers by weight or type for exactly this reason.
- Ambiguous yieldTwenty-four tomatoes reduced to a thick sauce would plausibly fill six to eight pint jars, but the original gives no figure and no jar size, another sign this is a household formula rather than a tested procedure.
- If you want chili sauceUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation extension service, which will give you weights, an acidification step and a boiling-water processing time for your jar size and altitude.
Chili sauce in the American sense has little to do with chilli peppers as most cooks now understand them; it is a thick, sweet-sour tomato relish, ketchup's chunkier cousin, and by the 1890s it appears to have been a familiar part of the late-summer preserving calendar in Northern kitchens. Its placement here among the Sunday menus is the whole logic of 52 Sunday Dinners: the book organises the year by what the market has, and high summer is when tomatoes, onions and peppers arrive together and cheaply. Recipes of this type circulated in almost identical form through community cookbooks and newspaper columns, and the proportions are given in dozens and cups rather than pounds. The instruction to "place on range" is a reminder of the era's equipment: a coal or gas range on which a heavy kettle could be left to reduce for an afternoon. The confident open-kettle sealing at the end was standard practice at the time and reflects how little was then understood, in domestic terms, about anaerobic spoilage.