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Bordeaux Sauce
4 quarts fine-chopped cab- 2 pounds sugar bage ½ cup salt 2 quarts fine-chopped green 2 quarts vinegar tomatoes I ounce mustard seed 6 quarts fine-chopped red ounce celery seed peppers 1/2 ounce, or less, turmeric 6 quarts fine-chopped onions Mix and let boil two hours.
Green Pepper Mangoes or Stuffed Peppers Score a circle around the stem of green peppers, a short distance from the stem, then,
A late-summer chopping relish of the piccalilli family, written for a household putting up a winter's worth at once. The proportions work, but the scale does not suit a modern stove.
- Enormous yieldThe vegetables alone come to 18 quarts chopped, plus 2 quarts of vinegar and 2 pounds of sugar; after two hours of boiling it would still fill many quarts of jars. Quartering the recipe brings the raw volume to about 5 quarts, which fits an 8-quart pot.
- The ounce measuresMustard seed, celery seed and turmeric are given by weight, not volume (and the figures for the celery seed and turmeric are damaged in the text). As a rough guide, an ounce of mustard seed is about 2 to 3 tablespoons, an ounce of celery seed about 4 tablespoons, and an ounce of ground turmeric about 3 tablespoons " worto worth tater tak the "or less" is worth taking, since turmeric at that level is assertive.
- Chopping"Fine-chopped" would have been done by hand, with a chopping bowl and knife or a hand-cranked food chopper. A food processor pulsed in small batches gives the same texture, but stop short of a purée or the relish turns to mush over the long boil.
- The salt is not drained offThere is no overnight salting and draining step here — the half cup of salt goes in with everything else. If you scale the recipe down, scale the salt with it.
- Two hours of boilingThat is a long simmer for chopped vegetables, and the point is reduction: green tomatoes and onions throw a great deal of water. Stir often once it thickens, as the sugar will catch on the bottom of the pot.
- Peppers"Red peppers" in this quantity almost certainly means sweet ripe bell or pimiento types rather than chiles. Six quarts of them ties with the onions as the largest component and gives the sauce its colour and sweetness.
- Keeping itThe original assumes hot relish ladled into jars and sealed, a practice no longer considered sufficient. Either refrigerate the finished relish and use it within a few weeks, or follow the processing time in a current tested canning guide for pepper-onion relish.
- The stray lines at the endThe sentence about scoring green peppers belongs to the next recipe in the book, for stuffed pepper mangoes, and has nothing to do with this sauce.
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookbooks used "Bordeaux sauce" for a chopped cabbage-and-pepper relish that seems to owe little to Bordeaux beyond the borrowed prestige of a French name — the same impulse often said to have produced "chili sauce" with no chiles in it. What it actually is, is a close cousin of chow-chow and piccalilli: the family is commonly traced to Anglo-Indian pickles brought home through the spice trade, though chow-chow's own origin is disputed, and this is the usual explanation offered for why turmeric, mustard seed and vinegar sit at the centre of nearly all of them. Recipes of this kind appear in preserving manuals because they solved a specific problem, namely the glut of green tomatoes, late cabbage and sweet peppers that came off a kitchen garden in a single September rush before frost. The quantities here — eighteen quarts of chopped vegetables — measure a household that expected to eat relish with plain boiled meat all winter.