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Chili Sauce
12 medium-sized ripe tomatoes 1 pepper, finely chopped 1 onion, finely chopped 2 cups vinegar 3 tablespoons sugar 1 tablespoon salt 2 teaspoons clove 2 teaspoons cinnamon 2 teaspoons allspice 2 teaspoons grated nutmeg Peel tomatoes and slice. Put in a preserving kettle with remaining ingredients. Heat gradually to boiling-point, and cook slowly two and one-half hours.
A vinegar-and-spice tomato sauce closer to an old-style ketchup than to anything on a modern hot sauce shelf. The recipe gives you the cooking but nothing about putting it up, which is the one thing to settle before you start.
- Storage, not canningNo jars, headspace, or processing time are given. Cook it and keep it in the refrigerator for a few weeks or freeze it; if you want shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested chili sauce recipe with measured acid and a specified boiling-water process, since the tomato-to-vinegar ratio here has no verified pH.
- QuantitiesTwelve medium tomatoes is roughly 4 to 4 1/2 lb, which cooks down considerably. The single "pepper" is most likely a green bell pepper rather than a chile; period chili sauce of this type was generally spiced rather than hot.
- The kettleA "preserving kettle" is a wide, heavy pot; period examples were often copper or porcelain-lined. Use stainless steel or enameled cast iron. Bare cast iron or aluminum can react with two cups of vinegar and give the sauce a metallic edge and a gray cast.
- Spice loadTwo teaspoons each of clove, cinnamon, allspice, and nutmeg is heavy by current taste, and two and a half hours of reduction concentrates the mixture further. Starting with half and adjusting near the end gives a sauce that tastes of tomato rather than of a spice tin.
- The long cookTwo and one-half hours is not padding; it is how the sauce loses roughly half its volume and thickens. Keep it at a bare simmer and stir the bottom regularly, as the sugar will scorch once the mixture gets dense.
- PeelingThirty seconds in boiling water and then into cold slips the skins cleanly. Do not skip it: the skins do not break down in this sauce and will roll up into tough threads.
- ServingSharp and heavily spiced. Sauces of this type were used as a table condiment for cold meat, chops, croquettes, and baked beans rather than as a cooking ingredient.
Chili sauce appears in American cookbooks from the later nineteenth century onward as one of a family of homemade tomato condiments alongside tomato ketchup, tomato butter, and various "catsups" made from mushrooms, walnuts, and currants. The name points to the chile pepper, but in versions like this one the pepper is a mild green one and the clove and allspice supply warmth and aroma rather than pungency — the label described a style of spiced tomato relish more than a level of heat. Its place in the canning and preserving chapter reflects the late-summer logic of the period household: tomatoes arrived all at once and in quantity, vinegar and sugar were the available preservatives, and a long afternoon at the preserving kettle turned a glut into something that would carry a plain winter dinner. Fannie Farmer's book, first published in 1896 for the Boston Cooking School, did much to popularize level, standardized measurements, though here the spicing is still given in the older generous style.