Important: Safety Warning
This page describes home-canning methods from before the causes of botulism were understood. Canning low-acid foods without a pressure canner, as described here, can allow the growth of Clostridium botulinum, whose toxin is among the deadliest known. Follow current USDA home-canning guidelines instead.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Home › Preserving › Chili Sauce
Chili Sauce
2 dozen tomatoes finely chopped 1 dozen onions finely chopped 1 dozen red peppers finely chopped 1 cup brown sugar 3 cups cider vinegar 1/4 cup salt Mix all ingredients, add more salt if needed, and boil slowly until thick. Keep in air-tight jars. 8 cups chopped green tomatoes
This is a workable relish formula wrapped in a canning method that cannot be verified as safe. The points below explain where the specific risk sits rather than how to rebuild it.
- The acid ratio is unknowableThree cups of cider vinegar are spread across two dozen tomatoes, a dozen onions and a dozen red peppers — anywhere from ten to twenty pounds of produce depending on the size of the vegetables, which the recipe never specifies. Onions and peppers are low-acid, and at this dilution there is no way to confirm the finished sauce sits below pH 4.6, the line under which Clostridium botulinum cannot grow.
- "Air-tight jars" is not a processThe instruction assumes that hot sauce sealed in a closed jar is safe indefinitely. Sealing traps an anaerobic environment, which is precisely what botulinum spores require; the spores survive boiling and are not killed by the brief simmer that thickens the sauce. No heat process, time or temperature is given for the filled jars.
- Modern tomatoes are less acidicTomato acidity is variable -- Tomato pH varies by variety and ripeness and can sit at or above 4.6, which is why current guidelines call for a measured addition of bottled lemon juice or citric acid in canned tomato products. It is often said that contemporary varieties are less acidic than older ones, though that claim is disputed. Either way, a recipe written before any measured acidification was standard cannot be relied on now.
- The stray last line"8 cups chopped green tomatoes" sits after the method with no instruction attached — almost certainly the opening line of the next recipe, caught by the typesetter or the scanner. It is not part of this ingredient list.
- Archaic quantities"2 dozen tomatoes" and "1 dozen red peppers" are counts, not weights. Any attempt to scale this by weight is guesswork.
- If you want chili sauceUse a current tested recipe from a state extension service or the USDA guide, which will give you a measured acid addition and a boiling-water-bath time for the jar size.
Chili sauce in American cookbooks of this period is not a hot sauce in the modern sense but a thick, sweet-sour tomato relish, closer to a coarse ketchup, eaten with cold meat, chops and croquettes. It belongs to the late-summer glut: tomatoes, onions and sweet red peppers all arrive at once, and the household answer was to chop the lot, boil it down with vinegar and sugar, and put it up in whatever jars were on hand. Lowney's, a Boston chocolate firm, issued its cook book with its own cocoa products in view, but the volume carries a full general repertoire, preserving chapters included, as a number of manufacturer cookbooks of the period did. The absence of any processing time is not necessarily carelessness: the botulism risk in home canning was not widely understood in the United States until the 1920s, and a good seal was often treated as the measure of success.