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Stuffed Peppers (Whole allspice one)
of whole allspice, one tablespoonful of cloves and then add the chopped peppers. Add a tablespoonful of salt, mix, and pack in jars. Cover with cold vinegar, stand aside over night and it is ready to use.
Pepper sauce is much better freshly made. It is not good over four days old.
This is the tail end of a chopped pepper relish — what the book calls a pepper sauce — and the page begins mid-sentence, so the pepper quantity, the vinegar quantity and the start of the spicing are all missing. What survives is workable if you treat it as a short-keeping refrigerator pickle rather than a preserve.
- The text is a fragmentThe surviving lines start partway through a spice list, so you have no pepper weight and no vinegar volume to work from. Read it as a method and take proportions from a current relish recipe.
- "Pepper sauce" here is not hot sauceIn American cookbooks of this period the name is often given to a coarse chopped relish in vinegar, closer to pepper hash or chow-chow than to a bottled capsicum sauce. The recipe does not say what kind of pepper is meant.
- Whole spices, not groundWhole spices -- The recipe calls for a tablespoon of whole allspice berries and a tablespoon of cloves (whole, on the strength of the parallel wording, though the text does not say so). These are aromatics to steep rather than to eat; tie them in muslin if you would rather not pick cloves out of every spoonful.
- Cold vinegar means uncookedNothing is heated at any stage. Use a vinegar of at least 5 percent acidity, which is standard supermarket cider or white vinegar, and enough to submerge the peppers completely.
- Jars, but not canningThis is not a sealed, processed preserve and it should not be treated as one. Clean jars with lids are all that is needed, and the jars go in the refrigerator, not the pantry.
- Four days is the real instructionThe book is unusually blunt that the sauce is no good past four days, and that is the hinge. Raw peppers in cold vinegar soften and dull quickly, so make a small quantity and keep it cold.
- SaltThe recipe gives a tablespoonful of salt but no pepper quantity, so there is no ratio to recover; scale the salt to whatever amount you cut. Coarse kosher or pickling salt dissolves cleanly and will not cloud the vinegar the way iodised table salt can.
- ServingIt belongs alongside cold meat, sausage, beans or fried fish, spooned out as a sharp condiment. Given the four-day limit, make only as much as you will use.
Chopped-pepper relishes in cold vinegar were a late-summer fixture in American kitchens once cheap glass jars and commercial vinegar made small batches easy, and they appear in cookbooks of the later nineteenth century alongside chow-chow, piccalilli and corn relish. What distinguishes this one is its bluntness about keeping: where many printed relish recipes promise long storage, this writer admits that an unheated, unsealed pepper sauce is a four-day proposition, which puts it closer to a daily-made table sauce than to the preserving cupboard. The page heading, "Stuffed Peppers," does not match the text beneath it, which suggests the recipe it belonged to has been lost.