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Pepper Relish (Emma G Smith Mrs Wm Sage red)
Emma G. Smith, Mrs. Wm. Sage. 12 red peppers 12 green peppers 12 large onions 6 green tomatoes Drain again through colander. 1 pt. vinegar 2½ C sugar Grind through meat grinder, pour boiling water over, let stand 5 minutes and drain. Pour more boiling water over and let stand 10 minutes. 3 level T salt Pour over relish and boil gently for 15 minutes. Put into sterilized
This is a church-supper relish from an era when a hot jar and a tight lid were considered proof of safety. The vegetable-to-vinegar ratio and the missing processing step put it outside what can be recommended today.
- Open-kettle sealingThe text breaks off at "Put into sterilized", presumably jars, and nothing further survives on the page. If the original ended there, this is open-kettle canning: hot food ladled into hot jars and left to seal on cooling. That method is no longer considered safe for home-canned products, because the seal is unreliable and nothing in the jar has been held at a verified temperature for a verified time.
- Not enough acid for the volumeOne pint of vinegar has to acidify roughly two dozen peppers, twelve onions and six tomatoes. Peppers and onions are low-acid vegetables, and green tomatoes are less acidic than people assume. There is no way to know the finished pH, and an under-acidified sealed jar of vegetables is the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum.
- Vinegar of unknown strengthHousehold vinegar of this period varied in acetic acid content, and the recipe does not say what kind was meant. Modern recipes specify 5 percent acidity for exactly this reason. "1 pt. vinegar" tells you nothing about how much acid actually goes into the jar.
- No processing time or temperatureThe fifteen-minute gentle boil cooks the relish; it does not process the sealed jars. Any current pickle recipe will give a boiling-water-bath time keyed to jar size and altitude. None appears in what survives of this one, which breaks off mid-sentence.
- The instructions are also out of orderAs printed, the ingredient list and the method are interleaved: "Drain again through colander" appears before any grinding or scalding is described, and the salt, sugar and vinegar are listed among the steps. However the jumbling arose, the page cannot be followed top to bottom.
- The blanching is doing real workTwo scaldings with boiling water, each followed by draining, mellow the raw onion and pepper and soften the grind. That part of the technique survives in modern pepper relish recipes.
- If you want to make pepper relishUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, which will specify vinegar strength, sugar and salt quantities by weight or measure, and a water-bath time.
Sweet pepper relish of this kind appears in American community cookbooks in the first decades of the twentieth century, when the household meat grinder made short work of vegetables that had previously been chopped by hand. The double scald with boiling water is characteristic of the type, and a similar relish was sold under the name "pepper hash" in the Middle Atlantic states. Community collections gathered whatever their contributors made well and in quantity, and a relish that used up green tomatoes alongside a late crop of peppers belongs to the end of the growing season. The heading carries two names, "Emma G. Smith" and "Mrs. Wm. Sage"; whether these are one contributor recorded two ways or two separate people cannot be determined from the page.