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Chili Sauce No. 2
1/2 peck tomatoes. 2 red peppers. 1 tablespoon nutmeg. 3 cups vinegar. 2 tablespoons salt. 1/2 tablespoon cloves. 4 tablespoons sugar. 4 large onions. 1 tablespoon allspice.
Peel and chop fine tomatoes with onions. Add spices in bag. Boil all together until thick.
A plain tomato relish of the kind that filled cellar shelves every September. The only real work is reducing it, and the only real decision is what to do with it once it is thick.
- Half a peck of tomatoesA peck is 8 dry quarts, so half a peck is 4 quarts — roughly 6 to 7 lb of whole tomatoes. Peeled, chopped and reduced, expect somewhere in the region of 2 to 3 pints of finished sauce.
- PeelingCut a shallow X in the base and drop the tomatoes into boiling water for 30 to 60 seconds; the skins slip off in cold water. Skins left in will show up as tough curls in the finished sauce.
- The spice bagGround nutmeg, cloves and allspice will wash straight through cheesecloth and cloud the sauce. Use whole spices tied in a doubled square of cheesecloth — about 1 tablespoon whole allspice, the cloves, and cracked nutmeg to taste, bearing in mind that a full tablespoon of nutmeg is a very heavy hand by modern palates — and pull the bag once the flavor is where you want it.
- Red peppersIn American recipes of this period "red peppers" in a chili sauce often meant ripe sweet peppers, with the bite coming from vinegar and spice rather than capsaicin, though the term was also used for hot sorts. Two red bell peppers give a mild result; a fresh cayenne or two if you want it hot.
- VinegarUse standard 5 percent cider or white vinegar. The recipe says to boil everything together; if you prefer a sharper sauce you can hold the vinegar back until the second half of cooking, since long boiling drives off much of the sharpness.
- "Boil until thick"Expect 2 to 3 hours at a lazy simmer in a wide, heavy, non-reactive pan, stirring more often as it reduces. It is done when a spoon drawn across the bottom leaves a track that fills in slowly rather than at once.
- Keeping itThe recipe stops at the pot and gives no sealing instructions, so treat it as a fresh condiment: refrigerate and use within two or three weeks, or freeze in small containers. If you want it shelf-stable, follow a current tested canning recipe with measured acid rather than adapting this one.
Chili sauce in American cookbooks of this period is not a hot sauce but a chunky, sweet-sour tomato relish, closer to a loose ketchup with the pieces left visible — the name traveled north with chile peppers while the recipe stayed with vinegar, sugar, onion and whole spice. That Mrs. Wilson prints a No. 2 suggests, though one can only guess, how routine it was: households made it in bulk when field tomatoes came in cheap and glutted. Her book dates from the years just after the First World War, when she was writing for the Ladies' Home Journal and the federal food-conservation campaigns, and the habit of putting up a half peck at a time was still the ordinary way to get tomato flavor onto a winter table.