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Red-Pepper Relish
12 red peppers 12 green peppers 3 large onions 1 quart vinegar 2 cups sugar 1 1/2 tablespoons salt Split the peppers and remove the seeds. Chop the peppers coarsely, pour boiling water over them and let stand for five minutes. Drain, pour more boiling water over them and let stand ten minutes. Drain and add the chopped onions. Boil the vinegar, sugar, and salt for five minutes, and add all the other ingredients. Cook the mixture ten minutes after it has come to a boil. Pack in clean, hot glass jars.
A straightforward sweet pepper relish of the open-kettle era. The one change worth making is in the finishing: modern practice is to process the filled jars in a boiling-water bath rather than trusting hot syrup and hot glass to seal them.
- Which peppersThe quantity of sugar and the treatment point to sweet bell or pimiento types rather than chiles. Twenty-four peppers is a large amount of flesh; weigh rather than count if you are scaling.
- The double blanchingThe two scaldings soften the pepper flesh so it takes up the syrup and take the raw edge off the flavour.
- Vinegar strengthUse a vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity, which is standard for cider and distilled white. Anything sold as a mild or "salad" vinegar is too weak to keep a relish safely.
- SaltUse pickling or kosher salt by volume; fine table salt packs more densely into a spoon and will taste saltier at the same measure.
- Sealing the jars"Pack in clean, hot glass jars" describes open-kettle canning, which is no longer considered reliable. Fill hot jars to 1/2 inch headspace and process 10 minutes in a boiling-water bath; refrigerate anything that does not seal.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; from this quantity of peppers expect several pints. Have more jars ready than you think you need.
- RestingRelishes of this type are usually better after some weeks in the jar than on the day they are made.
History: Sweet pepper relishes multiplied in American cookbooks between about 1890 and 1930, a period when bottled condiments were becoming familiar. The formula here is the standard one: peppers scalded to tame them, onion for body, and a boiled syrup of vinegar and sugar in roughly the proportions used for chowchow and pepper hash. The instruction to pack into clean hot jars, with no mention of processing, places the recipe in the open-kettle tradition.