Pepper Sauce
2 dozen peppers. Twice this quantity of cabbage. 1 root of horseradish, cut up fine. 1 tablespoonful mustard-seed. 1 dessertspoonful cloves. 2 tablespoonfuls sugar. A little mace.
Boil the spices and sugar in two quarts of best cider vinegar, and pour boiling hot over the cabbage and pepper.-Mrs. W.A. S.
This is a chopped vinegar pickle in the chow-chow family rather than a pourable hot sauce, and the original assumes you know how to handle a crock. A few things need translating.
- What "peppers" means hereNineteenth-century Virginia pepper sauces used small hot pods or the thick-walled sweet peppers of the kitchen garden, and the recipe does not say which. Two dozen small chiles gives a fiery relish; two dozen bell peppers gives a mild one. Choose by intent and seed them or not accordingly.
- Proportions"Twice this quantity of cabbage" is ambiguous: the peppers are given as a count, so this is probably twice their bulk rather than twice their weight, but the text does not say. The recipe only specifies fine cutting for the horseradish; shredding the cabbage and pepper fairly fine helps the hot vinegar penetrate.
- Spoon sizesA dessertspoonful is 2 teaspoons. "A little mace" is undefined; a blade or two, or a pinch of ground, is a reasonable reading.
- Whole spices, not groundThe mustard seed is named as seed, and cloves and mace at this date were commonly used whole, though the recipe does not say. Boiling them loose will cloud the liquid; tie them in a square of cheesecloth and lift the bag out, or leave the mustard seed in and bag the rest.
- The vinegar"Best" here means good-quality cider vinegar; period home-made vinegar varied in strength. Use a commercial cider vinegar at 5 percent acidity and do not cut it with water, since the acid is the main preservative.
- The hingeThe vinegar goes over the vegetables boiling hot, and the vegetables are raw; the recipe never cooks them. Pre-cooking the cabbage would leave it limp.
- Draining the cabbageCabbage sheds a lot of water, which will thin the vinegar. Salting the shredded cabbage, letting it stand an hour and pressing it dry is a modern remedy; the original calls for no salt and no such step.
- StorageNo sealing or processing is described, so treat this as a fresh refrigerator pickle: pack into clean jars, cool, and keep cold. Give it a week or so for the flavours to settle and use it up within a few weeks. For a shelf-stable version, follow a current tested pickling procedure.
- YieldThis makes a large batch, though how large depends on which pepper is meant: two quarts of vinegar plus the vegetables could be anything from about three quarts to well over a gallon. Halving or quartering the recipe works without adjustment.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, is full of these initialled recipes handed round between households, and its pickle chapter reflects a period when a Southern table was expected to carry several sharp condiments at once. What is called pepper sauce here belongs to the broad family of chow-chow and pepper hash rather than to bottled liquid hot sauce, which was already an established commercial product by the 1870s. Cabbage-and-pepper pickles of this kind were an autumn job, made when the pepper plants were stripped before frost and cabbage was cheap, and the heavy hand with cloves, mace and mustard seed is characteristic of Anglo-American pickling inherited from eighteenth-century English practice. The horseradish is doing double duty: flavour, and a traditional belief, often repeated in period cookbooks, that it helped keep vinegar pickles from spoiling.