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Pepper Hash
12 sweet red peppers 12 green peppers 12 very small onions Fannie Grinnell. 1 Remove seeds and chop very fine J Add 3 T salt and allow the mixture to simmer for ten minutes, then drain and add quart of vinegar and 1 C sugar. Heat the hash boiling hot and seal. Pepper hash is excellent for sandwiches.
A terse church-supper relish that assumes the cook already knows how pickling works. Two things need spelling out: the abbreviations, and the fact that "heat boiling hot and seal" is a canning method no longer considered sound.
- The abbreviationsT is tablespoon, C is cup. So 3 tablespoons salt, 1 cup sugar, 1 quart (4 cups) vinegar.
- Sealing is the weak point"Heat the hash boiling hot and seal" is open-kettle canning, standard practice when this was written and abandoned since. The jar contents are hot but the headspace and lid are never processed, so nothing drives out air or guarantees a vacuum. Treat this as a refrigerator relish, or process filled jars in a boiling-water bath using current published times for pepper relish.
- The salting stepChopped peppers and onions throw a surprising amount of liquid once salted, which is what lets them "simmer" ten minutes with no added water. Stir constantly at first over low heat until the juices run, or the bottom will scorch.
- Draining mattersDraining after the salted simmer removes most of the 3 tablespoons of salt along with the raw pepper liquid. Skip it and the finished hash is aggressively salty.
- Vinegar strengthVinegar strength was less standardised than it is now, so an old recipe's "quart of vinegar" is not a fixed quantity of acid. Use a 5 percent cider or white vinegar; anything labelled for cleaning, or of unstated or lower acidity, is not appropriate for a preserve.
- Chop size"Very fine" means a coarse mince, not a puree. A food processor pulsed a few times works, but overrun it and the hash turns to slurry and weeps in the jar.
- YieldThirty-six vegetables plus a quart of vinegar makes a large batch, well over three pints. Halving the recipe is sensible for a household that is not feeding a congregation.
- SeasoningThere is no spice here at all beyond salt, sugar and vinegar, unlike the spiced chow-chows in the same family. Celery seed or mustard seed would be an obvious addition if you want it less plain.
Pepper hash belongs to the large family of chopped sweet-and-sour vegetable relishes that American kitchens turned out every September, alongside chow-chow, piccalilli and corn relish. The name is straightforward: "hash" simply meant finely chopped, and the dish is often said to belong to Pennsylvania German cookery, where it was eaten with sausage and cold meats. Its appearance in a church fundraiser cookbook, credited by name to Fannie Grinnell, is typical of the genre, which is likely why the instructions assume so much and abbreviate so heavily. The note that it is "excellent for sandwiches" places it squarely in the era when a jar of something sharp on the pantry shelf was the standard answer to a plate of plain cold meat.