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Chili Sauce
4 quarts ripe tomatoes 1/2 pound brown sugar 1/2 cup salt 1/2 ounce cloves 1/2 ounce cinnamon 1/2 teaspoon mustard 1/2 red pepper 3 cups vinegar 2 cups small onions 2 tablespoons horseradish 1/2 ounce celery seed 1/2 ounce allspice 1/2 teaspoon black pepper Measure the tomatoes after they are peeled and chopped; put them over the fire and simmer for one hour. Chop the onions; grate the horseradish and grind the spices. Add all the other ingredients to the tomatoes; simmer for one hour longer and seal while hot in large-necked bottles that have been thoroughly sterilized.
A standard American tomato chili sauce of the canning-season type: two hours of open simmering, then bottling. The cooking is straightforward; the preserving method is the part that has been superseded.
- Do not seal by the open-kettle methodPouring hot sauce into sterilized bottles and capping them, with no processing after filling, is no longer considered a safe way to make a shelf-stable product; seals fail and spoilage organisms survive. Make the sauce, cool it, and keep it refrigerated for a few weeks, or follow a current tested recipe if you want jars for the pantry.
- QuantityFour quarts of tomatoes measured after peeling and chopping is roughly 8 to 10 pounds of whole fruit. The original gives no yield, and how much finished sauce you end with depends entirely on how far you take the two hours of reduction.
- The salt is period-heavyHalf a cup of salt in this volume reads as a preservative dose as much as a seasoning one. If you intend to refrigerate rather than store the sauce, it can be cut back and the seasoning adjusted at the end.
- Spices by weightHalf an ounce of cloves, cinnamon, allspice or celery seed is roughly 2 tablespoons ground, give or take with each spice's density. The instruction to grind them yourself matters: pre-ground spice from a jar has lost much of its volatile oil and will taste flat after two hours of simmering.
- "1/2 red pepper" is ambiguousThe original does not say whether this is a sweet red pepper or a dried hot one. It may well be a small dried red chile or a fresh cayenne-type pod; half a bell pepper would add almost no heat. Decide which you want before you commit.
- HorseradishGrate it fresh if you can. Its pungency is a volatile compound that dissipates with heat, so most of what you add during a one-hour simmer will cook away — some cooks reserve a portion to stir in at the end.
- Heat and stirring"Over the fire" means a low, steady simmer. Tomato sauce this thick scorches readily in the second hour once it has reduced; a heavy-bottomed pot and regular stirring are worth more than any adjustment to the timing.
Chili sauce in an American cookbook of this period means a chunky, sweet-sour spiced tomato condiment, a close relative of the homemade tomato catsups that fill the same chapters — not a Mexican chile sauce, and often barely hot at all. Its markers are the whole-spice quartet of clove, cinnamon, allspice and celery seed, plus vinegar and brown sugar, a flavor profile shared with the pickles and catsups that were put up in the same late-summer week when tomatoes came in by the bushel. Preserving is the point: this was a way to hold the tomato crop through winter, and the heavy salt, the vinegar and the long reduction are all doing preservative work, not just seasoning.