Home › Preserving › Pepper and Onion Relish
Pepper and Onion Relish
Peel six white onions; cut six red and six green peppers in halves and remove the seeds; chop fine the onions and peppers with half a cup of parsley leaves, cover the whole with boiling water, set a plate above and let stand five minutes; drain, add one cup of sugar, two teaspoonfuls of salt, and two cups of vinegar; let boil half an hour; seal in small cans.
A sweet-sour pepper relish of the sort that filled American cellar shelves a century ago. The ingredients are sound; the preserving method is the part that has been superseded, and it is the reason this one should not be followed as printed.
- The sealing method is the failure"Seal in small cans" describes open-kettle canning: hot relish ladled into jars and closed with no processing afterward. There is no measured headspace, no jar sterilisation step, and no boiling-water bath, so nothing guarantees a sound vacuum or destroys the surface moulds and yeasts introduced during filling. A current tested pepper relish recipe with a stated processing time should be used instead.
- Vinegar of unknown strengthHousehold vinegar of this period was cider or white vinegar of no declared acidity, and could differ from today's standardised 5 per cent. The safety of any pickled relish rests on the finished acidity, and this recipe gives no way to know it — two cups of vinegar against eighteen vegetables of unstated size is not a controlled ratio.
- "Small cans"Probably not tin cans; in books of this period "can" is often used of glass screw-top or wire-bail preserving jars, and "small" would suggest something in the pint to half-pint range.
- White onions and red and green peppersThe peppers are most likely sweet bell peppers rather than hot ones. The use of both red and green may have been for colour as much as flavour, though the recipe does not say so.
- The boiling-water scaldCovering the chopped vegetables with boiling water under a plate for five minutes takes the raw bite off the onion and softens the pepper skins. The plate is there to keep everything submerged, not to weight it.
- Half an hour of boilingThirty minutes reduces the vegetables to a soft, jammy relish with very little crunch left, a texture belonging to the same era as the sealing instruction.
Pepper relishes multiplied in American cookbooks in the decades around 1900, alongside chow-chow, piccalilli and corn relish, adapted to whatever the kitchen garden produced in quantity at the end of summer. The appeal was partly economy: a jar of something sharp and sweet made cold meat, beans and boiled dinners palatable through the winter. Reliable time-and-temperature guidance for home canning came later, largely out of the agricultural extension services and the wartime food-conservation campaigns of the late 1910s, which is why recipes from just before that period so often look confident and vague at the same moment.