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Chili Vinegar
Common pepper sauce. Dilute a bottle with two quarts of vinegar for salad seasoning. A tablespoonful is enough to mix in a salad.
Barely a recipe by modern standards, but a useful one: a bottled hot sauce stretched into a mild seasoning vinegar for dressing salads. The proportions are the whole of it, so they are worth pinning down.
- "Common pepper sauce"This means a bottled cayenne or bird-pepper sauce of the period, essentially peppers steeped in vinegar and salt and sold in a small glass bottle; the recipe does not state a size. A modern Louisiana-style sauce is the closest equivalent; thick, sweetened or garlic-heavy sauces are not.
- The ratioOne small bottle to two quarts (8 cups) of vinegar is a very heavy dilution -- on the order of one part sauce to a dozen or more of vinegar, depending on the bottle. The result is a faintly warm, lightly salted vinegar rather than anything you would call hot.
- Which vinegarCider vinegar was common in American kitchens of this era; white wine vinegar also works. Modern bottled vinegars are around 5 percent acidity, so the mixture stays acidic enough to keep well.
- Yield and doseYou end up with about two quarts, and the recipe's own guidance is a tablespoon per salad. That is a great deal of chili vinegar for one household; scale it down, keeping the same very high proportion of vinegar to sauce.
- StorageBottle it, cap it, keep it in the cupboard. The acidity does the preserving, but expect the color to dull over a few months and the pepper aroma to fade.
- Using itTreat it as the acid in a vinaigrette rather than a finishing sauce: three parts oil to one part chili vinegar, salt to taste. Because the bottled sauce already carries salt, season the dressing after mixing, not before.
Pepper vinegars were a fixture of nineteenth-century tables on both sides of the Atlantic, sold and made at home as a way of carrying the heat of small hot peppers in a keeping form; English cookbooks list "chili vinegar" among the flavored vinegars alongside tarragon, garlic and horseradish. By the time this book was written, a cook no longer needed to steep the peppers personally, since commercially bottled pepper sauce could be had ready-made, and the recipe reflects that shift: the work is now dilution rather than infusion. The instruction to use only a tablespoonful in a salad suggests that bottled sauces were treated as concentrates to be tamed rather than condiments to be poured.