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Chili Sauce
12 large ripe tomatoes. 2 onions. 3 green peppers. 2 tablespoonfuls sugar. 2 tablespoonfuls salt 2 cups vinegar 1 tablespoonful cinnamon Peel tomatoes and onions and chop, separately, very fine; add peppers, chopped, and other ingredients, and cook one hour and a half.
The text as printed in this book has lost most of its ingredient list — only the salt, vinegar and cinnamon survive, while the tomatoes, onions and peppers that the method calls for arrive with no quantities at all. That gap matters more here than it would in a cake, because this is a preserving recipe.
- The recipe is incompleteThe method refers to tomatoes, onions and peppers that never appear in the ingredient list, so the ratio of vegetables to the 2 cups of vinegar is unknown. In a preserve, that ratio is the recipe.
- Why the acid ratio decides safetyTomatoes sit close to the pH boundary that separates safe boiling-water processing from pressure canning, and onions and peppers are firmly low-acid. A sauce that is mostly onion and pepper with a splash of vinegar can finish above pH 4.6, which is the range in which Clostridium botulinum spores can germinate in a sealed jar.
- An hour and a half of simmering is not sterilisationOpen-kettle preserving — cook, ladle hot into jars, seal — was standard practice in this period and is no longer considered sound. Boiling drives off some acid as well, and nothing in the method establishes a processing time or a seal that can be verified.
- Cinnamon and salt do nothing preservative hereA tablespoon of cinnamon is flavour, and since the vegetable quantities are missing there is no way to know the salt-to-volume ratio; 2 tablespoons of salt is in any case seasoning rather than a cure. Neither can be relied on to keep the sauce safe.
- If you want chili sauceUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, which will specify added bottled lemon juice or citric acid and a measured boiling-water process. This page is worth reading; it is not worth canning from.
- Reading the original"Chop very fine" reflects a pre-food-processor kitchen where texture came from knife work; the instruction to chop tomatoes and onions separately is not explained in the text.
Chili sauce in American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is not a hot sauce but a thick, sweet-sour tomato relish, a close cousin of ketchup and of the various "chow-chows" and piccalillis that filled the preserving chapter of many household manuals. The name points to the capsicums in it rather than to any Mexican or Southwestern origin; "chilli" was simply the word for the pepper. Books of this kind assumed a late-summer glut of tomatoes and a cellar shelf to be filled, and the preserving section existed to turn a few bushels into something that would last until spring. Where warm spices such as cinnamon appear, they belong to the same spicing tradition that produced commercial bottled ketchup, and it is one reason the two products drifted so close together on the grocer's shelf.