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Chili Sauce with Onion & Nutmeg
12 medium sized ripe tomatoes 1 pepper chopped finely 1 onion 2 C vinegar 3 T sugar 1 T salt 2 t cloves Mrs. Nellie Kimball. 2 t cinnamon 2 t allspice 2 t grated nutmeg Peel tomatoes and slice. Put into kettle with other ingredients, heat slowly to boiling point and cook slowly for 2½ hours. 1/2 bu. tomatoes 6 large onions 4 green peppers
A plain community-cookbook chili sauce: tomatoes, vinegar, sugar and sweet spice cooked down to a thick, ketchup-like relish. The transcription carries at least one obvious typographical error and an unfinished second version, both worth sorting out before you start.
- "Cook slowly for 22 hours"This is almost certainly a misprint for 2 hours. Twelve tomatoes with two cups of vinegar will reduce to a thick sauce in roughly two hours of gentle simmering, stirred often near the end so the sugar does not catch.
- The abbreviationsC is cup, T tablespoon, t teaspoon. So 2 cups vinegar, 3 tablespoons sugar, 1 tablespoon salt, and 2 teaspoons each of cloves, cinnamon, allspice and nutmeg.
- That is a great deal of spiceEight teaspoons of ground warm spice for a dozen tomatoes gives a sauce closer to a spiced ketchup than anything hot. Halving the cloves and allspice on a first batch is reasonable if you want the tomato forward.
- "1 pepper"Genuinely ambiguous. The larger batch at the foot of the page calls for green peppers, so a sweet bell pepper is the likely intent, not a chili. The name of the sauce refers to the spicing, not to heat.
- Peeling the tomatoesScore, drop into boiling water for 30 to 60 seconds, then into cold water and the skins slip off. Skins left in will curl into tough shreds through the whole batch.
- The vinegarHousehold vinegar of this period was variable in strength. Use a standard 5 percent cider or white vinegar; do not substitute a low-acid specialty vinegar.
- The trailing fragment"1/2 bu. tomatoes, 6 large onions, 4 green peppers" is the start of a scaled-up version whose spicing was never set in type. Half a bushel is about 26 lb of tomatoes. Ignore it and make the small batch.
- Yield and keepingTwelve medium tomatoes cook down to roughly 3 to 4 cups. The book gives no canning instructions, so treat it as a refrigerator relish and use it within a few weeks. If you want it shelf-stable, follow a current tested tomato-relish process rather than improvising from this text.
Chili sauce in American cookbooks of this period has almost nothing to do with chilies as we now use the word. It is a chunkier, sweeter, more heavily spiced cousin of tomato ketchup, and through the late nineteenth century the two recipes often sat side by side in community collections, the ketchup strained smooth and the chili sauce left rough. Both belong to the late-summer preserving rush, when a household faced more ripe tomatoes than it could eat and turned them into something that would carry through the winter with cold meat. Mrs. Kimball's proportions of clove, cinnamon, allspice and nutmeg are the signature of one kitchen rather than a standard formula. The typesetting here, with the contributor's name dropped into the middle of the ingredient column and a second recipe abandoned halfway, is characteristic of books assembled and printed locally by volunteers rather than editors.