Home › Preserving and Canning › Chili Sauce
Chili Sauce
12 medium-sized ripe tomatoes 1 red pepper 1 onion 2 cups vinegar 1/3 cup sugar 2 tablespoons salt 2 teaspoons cloves 2 teaspoons cinnamon 2 teaspoons allspice 2 teaspoons nutmeg Peel and slice tomatoes; add chopped pepper and onion; put into kettle with remaining ingredients. Heat slowly to boiling and cook slowly for 2 1/2 hours. Seal in sterilized jars.
This is a sound-tasting tomato relish attached to a canning method that has since been abandoned. The cooking is not the problem; the sealing is.
- Open-kettle sealing"Seal in sterilized jars" means ladling hot sauce into hot jars and closing them, trusting the cooling vacuum to pull the lid down. That seal is unreliable, and nothing sterilizes the headspace or the underside of the lid after filling. Current practice requires a measured boiling-water-bath process after the jars are filled and capped.
- No processing time is givenThe recipe stops at the seal. Without a stated jar size and a stated number of minutes in a boiling-water bath, there is no way to know the product was ever brought to a safe condition inside a closed container.
- Acidity is not controlledTwo cups of vinegar sounds generous, but "12 medium-sized ripe tomatoes" is a weight that can vary by several pounds, and onion and pepper are both low-acid. The finished pH could land anywhere. Tested modern relishes fix the ratio by weight or measured cups, precisely because eyeballed tomatoes will not do it.
- Tomatoes have changedTomato acidity varies with variety and ripeness, and some tomatoes sit above pH 4.6 on their own; the often-repeated claim that modern cultivars are bred for low acidity is harder to document. Either way, an older cook's assumption of a tart tomato cannot be relied on, which is why current tomato canning directions specify added acid by measure.
- The hazard is botulismA low-acid, oxygen-free sealed jar held at room temperature is the environment Clostridium botulinum requires. The spores survive the 2 1/2 hours of open simmering, which never exceeds boiling point. The toxin they can later produce is not detectable by smell or appearance.
- If you want chili sauceUse a current tested recipe from a reputable food-preservation source, which will give jar size, headspace, acid ratio and processing time. Alternatively, cook this as written and keep it in the refrigerator as a fresh condiment for a couple of weeks rather than shelf-storing it.
- On the spicesTwo teaspoons each of clove, cinnamon, allspice and nutmeg is a heavy hand by present taste, and the ground spices will darken the sauce considerably over 2 1/2 hours of slow cooking. Some period recipes tie whole spices in a muslin bag and lift them out for a cleaner colour.
American "chili sauce" of this era is not a hot sauce but a thick, sweet-sour tomato relish, a close cousin of ketchup with the pulp left coarse rather than sieved smooth. It became a fixture of home canning chapters in the decades either side of 1900, when the late-summer tomato glut met a household still expected to put up its own condiments, and the sweet-spice register here — clove, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg — is the same one that flavoured commercial ketchups of the period. A preserving section was expected of any general cookbook. The open-kettle sealing it recommends was common household advice for generations; it was displaced as home-economics extension services and, later, the USDA worked out and published measured processing times.