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Chili Sauce
Twelve large ripe tomatoes, four ripe or three green peppers, two onions, two table-spoons salt, two of sugar, one of cinnamon, three cups vinegar; peel tomatoes and onions, chop (separately) very fine, add the peppers (chopped) with the other ingredients, and boil one and a half hours. Bottle and it will keep a long time. Stone jugs are better than glass cans. One quart of canned tomatoes may be used instead of the ripe ones. This Chili sauce is excellent and much better and more healthful than catsups. -Mrs. E. W. Herrick, Minneapolis, Minn.
A recognizable ancestor of the bottled chili sauce still sold beside ketchup, but the preserving method belongs entirely to 1877 and cannot be carried over.
- Why the keeping method failsThe sauce is poured hot into jugs and left to seal itself — what canners call open-kettle bottling. Nothing establishes the finished acidity, nothing processes the filled container, and onions and sweet peppers are low-acid vegetables suspended in an oxygen-free environment, which is precisely the condition Clostridium botulinum requires. A current tested recipe with a measured water-bath process should be used instead.
- Stone jugsThe preference for stoneware over glass was likely a matter of cost and breakage rather than safety. A stone jug cannot be inspected for spoilage, cannot form a vacuum seal, and glazes on vessels of this vintage may be lead-bearing.
- Tomatoes are not what they wereSome modern cultivars are said to run lower in acid than older field tomatoes; in any case tested tomato preserves now specify added lemon juice or citric acid by volume for all varieties, since acidity cannot be judged by taste. The three cups of vinegar here were also of unknown strength; household vinegar was not consistently standardized at 5 percent acetic acid until the twentieth century.
- "Four ripe or three green peppers"These are most likely sweet peppers rather than chiles, the sauce taking its name from the style rather than from heat. Nineteenth-century "peppers" in Midwestern receipts are usually the large bell or bullnose types.
- The proportions themselvesTwelve large ripe tomatoes would come to six pounds or more, rather more than the quart of canned tomatoes offered as a substitute; the recipe gives no yield.
- The cinnamonA full tablespoon of ground cinnamon in a batch this size marks the recipe as part of the sweet-spiced catsup tradition, closer to a preserve than to a hot sauce. Clove, allspice and cinnamon were the standard trio for tomato condiments before chile heat took over.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) was assembled from contributions by women readers, which is why so many entries carry a name and a town — Mrs. Herrick's Minneapolis address is part of the book's method, a network of home kitchens vouching for one another. Her closing boast, that the sauce is "much better and more healthful than catsups," is the most period-specific thing on the page: commercially bottled catsup was widely suspected of adulteration, and home cooks made their own partly as a matter of distrust. "Chili sauce" as an American name is generally traced to the chunkier, vinegar-forward tomato relishes of the same decades, distinguished from smooth catsup by being chopped rather than strained; the chile connection here is nominal, since this version appears to use only sweet peppers.