Chili Sauce
Ten pounds tomatoes, two pounds onions, seven ounces green peppers, without seeds, six ounces sugar, four ounces salt, one and one-half pints vinegar; slice tomatoes, chop onions and peppers; boil all together several hours, or until quite thick; this makes three or four quarts.
A plain tomato condiment from the era when "chili sauce" meant a chunky, sweet-sour tomato relish rather than anything hot. The proportions are sound; what the original leaves out is spice, and any word about keeping it.
- Weight, not volumeThe ounces here are weights. Six ounces of sugar is a scant cup, four ounces of salt about half a cup of fine salt, and seven ounces of green peppers is roughly two medium bell peppers once seeded.
- The vinegar measureOne and a half pints is 3 cups. Period cider vinegar ran variable in strength; modern 5% vinegar is fine and gives a sharper result than the original likely had.
- The hinge: slow reductionTen pounds of tomatoes is mostly water. Use a wide, heavy, non-reactive pan so evaporation happens across a large surface, keep the heat at a bare simmer, and stir the bottom often once it thickens. Scorched tomato taints the whole batch and cannot be stirred back out.
- PeelingThe recipe says only to slice. Unpeeled tomatoes leave curls of skin through the finished sauce. Blanching and slipping the skins off first takes twenty minutes and improves the texture considerably.
- "Green peppers" means sweet peppersNineteenth-century American recipes use "green pepper" for the unripe bell pepper. If you want heat, it has to be added; as written this sauce has none.
- SpicingMany published chili sauces of the period carried cloves, allspice, cinnamon, mustard or ginger. This one is bare. A tablespoon or two of whole spices tied in cloth and simmered for the last hour brings it closer to what contemporaries would have expected.
- Salt levelHalf a cup of salt across three to four quarts is assertive by modern taste but was doing preservative work. Reducing it changes the keeping qualities as well as the flavour.
- Yield and storageThree to four quarts, as stated, assumes a household that would seal it in jars. Treat it as a fresh sauce: refrigerate for a couple of weeks or freeze in portions. If you want it shelf-stable, follow a current tested canning recipe with measured acidity and processing times rather than this text.
American "chili sauce" of the late nineteenth century has little to do with chilli heat. It was a cousin of tomato ketchup, made in the same September glut, chopped rather than strained smooth, and eaten with cold meat, chops and hash. The name is generally traced to the tomato-and-pepper sauces of Mexico and the Southwest as they were adapted by Anglo-American cooks, who kept the tomato and the pepper but dropped the fire. Recipes like this one, running to ten pounds of tomatoes, belong to the annual preserving day rather than to daily cooking: an entire crop reduced over a slow fire, bottled, and drawn on through the winter.