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Shirley Sauce
12 large ripe tomatoes 2 hot green peppers 2 C vinegar 1 C sugar 2 onions Chop vegetables. Boil slowly about three hours. This is a very small amount when cooked.
Mrs. M. R. Miller.
A plain cooked tomato relish of the kind church cookbooks printed by the dozen — four ingredients, a long slow reduction, and no instruction on what to do with it afterward. The hinge is the boiling: three hours is not a typo, it is how you get from watery chopped tomato to something thick enough to spoon.
- The measurements"C" is cup throughout: 2 cups vinegar, 1 cup sugar. Twelve large ripe tomatoes is roughly 5-6 lb, which is why the recipe warns that the finished yield is small; expect a couple of cups at most, though the recipe gives no figure.
- Peel or notThe recipe says only "chop." Skins will curl into tough flecks over three hours, so peel the tomatoes first (score, 30 seconds in boiling water, slip the skins) unless you want the texture. Seeds are less of a problem and can stay.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold vinegar was commonly cider vinegar at around 4-5 percent acidity. Any 5 percent cider or white vinegar works here.
- The peppersTwo hot green peppers is genuinely open-ended, with no variety named. Start with two serranos or one jalapeño, taste at the end, and add heat then rather than at the start.
- Managing three hoursUse a wide, heavy pan and keep the heat low enough that it barely moves. As the sauce thickens in the last 45 minutes it will catch and scorch quickly; stir often and scrape the corners. If it thickens before the time is up, stop early — the goal is jam consistency, not the clock.
- What is missingThere is no salt and no spice. A teaspoon of salt added partway through makes an enormous difference, and the sauce takes well to a little mustard seed, celery seed or a stick of cinnamon fished out at the end.
- StorageNo canning directions are given and none should be improvised. Treat this as a refrigerator relish: cool, jar, and keep chilled for two or three weeks, or freeze in small containers. For shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested tomato-relish process.
- ServingThick, sweet-sour and hot. No use is stated, but a sauce like this suits cold meat, pork chops, beans or sausages, a tablespoon at a time. That small yield goes further than it looks.
"Shirley sauce" is the kind of named tomato relish that sits alongside Chili Sauce, Tomato Soy, Pepper Hash and Blackberry Ketchup in the pickle chapter of every parish and church fundraiser book from the 1880s into the mid-twentieth century. The name is most likely a family or local one rather than a fixed formula; recipes in these books are often said to have traveled by handwritten card and taken the name of whoever passed them along, which is why the contributor's name matters as much as the title. What distinguishes this one from its neighbors is its severity: no spice bag, no celery, no allspice, just tomato, onion, hot pepper, vinegar and sugar cooked down until concentrated. The aside that "this is a very small amount when cooked" is the authentic voice of these collections — a cook warning a stranger about the one thing the ingredient list does not reveal, namely that five pounds of tomatoes will disappear into a pint.