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Chili Sauce (Thirty large ripe tomatoes ten)
Thirty large ripe tomatoes, ten medium-sized white or yellow onions, six green peppers, four teaspoons of salt, one cup granulated sugar, two cups of vinegar; remove skins from tomatoes, pare onions, scrape out all seeds from peppers, then chop all rather coarse; stir all together and boil slowly about three hours. If not sweetened to taste, more sugar may be added.
— Miss Marguerite E. Craigie
A plain village chili sauce — closer to a sweet-sour tomato relish than to anything hot. The recipe assumes a heavy preserving kettle, an all-day stove and a cook who will taste as it goes.
- Scale and yieldThirty large ripe tomatoes is roughly 12-15 lb, which should cook down to a few pints of finished sauce. The recipe halves or quarters readily, though a smaller batch will reduce in less than the stated three hours.
- "Green peppers"Almost certainly sweet bell peppers rather than chiles; nothing in the ingredient list is hot. If you want warmth, a pinch of cayenne is in keeping with other period versions.
- Skinning the tomatoesScore an X in the base, drop into boiling water for 30-60 seconds, then into cold water and the skins slip off. Do this in batches rather than all at once or the later tomatoes start to cook.
- Chop coarse, and mean itThe three-hour boil breaks everything down anyway. A food processor turns the vegetables to slurry and the sauce loses the texture that distinguishes it from ketchup.
- The three-hour boilThat timing is the hinge, and it is honest — this is a reduction, not a simmer for flavour. Use the widest heavy pan you have, keep the heat low and stir often once it thickens, because the sugar will catch and scorch on the bottom.
- SeasoningFour teaspoons of salt across this quantity of vegetables is restrained; taste at the end and adjust. Many period chili sauce recipes carry a spice bag of cinnamon, clove and allspice; this one does not.
- VinegarThe recipe says only 'vinegar'; cider vinegar suits the sweetness better than white. Period vinegar was of variable strength, so a modern 5 percent vinegar is a reasonable working substitute.
- StorageNo sealing instructions are given, so treat this as a refrigerator relish: cool, jar and keep chilled, using within a few weeks, or freeze in portions. For shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested tomato-relish canning procedure rather than this one, which specifies no processing at all.
Chili sauce in American cookbooks of this period means a chunky, sweet-sharp tomato preserve, a first cousin to ketchup, and a common accompaniment to boiled or roast meat at a plain table. It belongs to the late-summer glut: tomatoes, onions and peppers ripening at once, a big kettle on the back of the range, and a shelf of jars against winter. Community books like this one collected such receipts by name, and the small variations between them, more sugar here, a spice bag there, were the whole point of printing them. The Catskill compilers' "Village Receipts" heading is a fair description of the genre: household knowledge that circulated by conversation and got written down only when someone decided to raise money by publishing it.