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Pepper Sauce
Chop one red and one green pepper fine. Cut one hard head of cabbage on a slaw cutter. Mix with it two tablespoonfuls of whole mustard seed, one tablespoonful
The text breaks off mid-sentence, so what survives is the solid part of an uncooked cabbage-and-pepper relish — the sort of thing a cook of the period would have finished with salt, sugar, spices and vinegar. Read the points below before starting, because the recipe as printed cannot be completed.
- The recipe is incompleteThe page ends at "one tablespoonful" and never names the second spice, the salt, the sugar or the vinegar. Nothing here tells you the brine proportions, which are the whole point of a pickle. Use a current tested recipe for the liquid and salt if you want to make this.
- "Pepper sauce" is not hot sauce"Pepper sauce" did not always mean hot sauce -- the name was used both for chopped sweet-pepper relishes and pickles and for hot peppers steeped in vinegar. The chopped cabbage and mustard seed here point to the relish sense, in which case the red and green peppers would be sweet rather than pungent, though the text does not say so.
- Slaw cutterA wooden board fitted with angled blades, a close relative of the mandoline. A mandoline on its thinnest setting, or the slicing disc of a food processor, gives the same fine shreds; a knife works but takes longer to get an even cut.
- "One hard head of cabbage"A firm, dense white or Dutch cabbage; the recipe gives no weight, so read it as an average firm head, roughly 2 to 3 lb. Density matters more than size -- a loose, leafy head sheds water and turns the relish slack.
- Whole mustard seedMost likely yellow (white) mustard seed, which stays whole and mild in vinegar. Brown or black seed is considerably sharper and will change the character of the finished relish.
- Salting the cabbageMany relishes of this kind draw water off the shredded cabbage with salt for some hours before the vinegar goes on. The surviving text does not mention it, but skipping the step tends to leave a diluted, watery pickle.
- StorageWith no processing instructions and no measured acid, treat anything you make along these lines as a refrigerator relish to be eaten within a week or two rather than as a shelf-stable preserve.
Chopped cabbage-and-pepper relishes ran through American household cookery from the mid-nineteenth century onward under a scatter of names -- pepper hash, chow-chow, cold slaw pickle, pepper sauce -- and the boundaries between them were never firm. The red and green peppers were as much about appearance as flavour: sweet peppers were a cheap way to put colour into a winter jar at a time when the relish dish was a common part of the table, set out to be eaten with cold meat, boiled dinners and fried fish. Whole mustard seed served the same double duty, adding a mild bite while staying visible in the jar. The slaw cutter named here was a common piece of period kitchen equipment, and its appearance in recipes like this one is a reminder of how much of the era's cooking depended on being able to shred a great deal of cabbage quickly.