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Bordeaux Sauce
Mrs. E. J. Brixen. jars. 2 qts. green tomatoes, chopped 4 T salt 3 red peppers 2 T celery seed 5 good-sized onions 2 T tumeric powder 1 T allspice 3 C sugar 2 T white mustard seed 4 C vinegar Cook and put into glass jars.
A standard end-of-season green tomato relish, written in the telegraphic shorthand church cookbooks used to save print. The measures are all there; the method is barely a sentence, so most of the work is filling in what Mrs. Brixen assumed everyone knew.
- Reading the abbreviationsT is a tablespoon, C is a cup. Two quarts of chopped green tomatoes works out to somewhere in the region of 3 1/2 to 4 lb of whole fruit before chopping; the conversion is approximate.
- Salt first, then drainThe recipe says nothing about it, but 4 tablespoons of salt in this volume reads more like a drawing agent than seasoning. If you treat it that way, toss the chopped tomatoes and onions with the salt, leave them several hours or overnight, then drain well; salting the mixture and draining it will cut both the free liquid and the cooking time.
- "Cook" means reduceBring everything to a simmer and hold it, uncovered, 45 minutes to an hour, until the syrup coats a spoon and no free liquid pools when you drag a spatula through. This is the step that decides whether you get relish or pickled soup.
- Red peppersCounted by the unit, so fresh whole red peppers, seeded and chopped, not dried chile flakes. How hot the result is depends on which variety you use; the recipe does not say.
- TurmericTwo tablespoons of ground turmeric is doing the colouring work here, as in piccalilli and chow-chow. It stains wood, plastic and grout stubbornly, so use stainless or enamel and a non-reactive spoon.
- AllspiceProbably ground, though the recipe does not say, and a tablespoon is a lot. If you want the sweet-spice note without the muddy look, tie whole berries in cheesecloth and fish them out at the end.
- Sealing"Put into glass jars" is open-kettle canning, which is no longer considered a sound seal for shelf storage. Either follow current tested water-bath directions for a green tomato relish, or jar it, cool it and keep it in the refrigerator, where the vinegar and sugar will hold it for a couple of months.
- YieldAbout 4 to 5 pints. Serve it as a condiment relish with cold meat, sausage, beans or cheese, a tablespoon or two at a time.
Recipes titled "Bordeaux sauce" turn up all over American community cookbooks between roughly the 1890s and the 1920s, and they have nothing to do with the wine-and-marrow sauce bordelaise of French cookery; the name was borrowed, much as "chili sauce" and "Spanish relish" were, and attached to what is plainly a mustard-and-turmeric green tomato relish in the piccalilli and chow-chow family. Its real reason for existing is the frost: a Midwestern gardener facing a vine full of tomatoes that will never ripen chopped them green, salted them, and turned them into something that would sit in the cellar all winter beside the cold beef. That a church congregation printed it among its pickles and relishes tells you how routine such thrift was.