Chili Sauce
Two quarts of ripe tomatoes, four large onions, four chili peppers; chop fine, then add four cups vinegar, three tablespoonfuls brown sugar, two of salt, two teaspoonfuls each of cloves, cinnamon, ginger, allspice and nutmeg; boil all thoroughly together and bottle after straining through a colander.
A late-Victorian tomato condiment of the ketchup family, closer to a loose relish than to anything sold as chili sauce today. Two things need translating: the spicing, which is heavy by modern taste, and the word "bottle", which stands in for a whole preserving process the book does not describe.
- Two quarts of tomatoesWhether measured whole or already chopped is not clear from the text; either way roughly 3 1/2 to 4 lb of ripe tomatoes. Plum or other paste types give a thicker sauce with less boiling; scald and slip the skins first if you want a smooth result.
- "Four chili peppers" is genuinely vagueThe original gives no variety and no size, and the peppers sold under that name varied widely in heat and form. Four fresh serranos and four dried cayennes are not the same seasoning. Start with a couple, taste as it reduces, and add more.
- The spices are the hingeTwo teaspoons each of cloves, cinnamon, ginger, allspice and nutmeg is just over three tablespoons of ground spice for the whole batch. By current taste it reads medicinal. Half quantities give something recognisably like this sauce and still assertive.
- "Boil all thoroughly"Means reduce, not just bring to the boil. Expect 45 minutes to an hour and a half of open simmering, stirring often once it thickens, until the volume drops by about a third and no watery liquid separates on a cold plate.
- Straining through a colanderNot draining. The cooked pulp is pushed through with the back of a spoon or a ladle so the flesh and spice pass and the skins, seeds and pepper debris stay behind. A food mill does the same job faster.
- VinegarFour cups of any 5% cider or white vinegar works. Adding it at the start, as written, means a long simmer with acid in the pan, so use stainless or enamel rather than bare cast iron or aluminium.
- Yield and storageThe recipe gives no yield, and it depends on how far you reduce it. It says only "bottle", with no description of any sealing or processing. Treat the result as a fresh sauce: refrigerate and use within a few weeks, or follow a current tested water-bath canning procedure for tomato relishes if you want it shelf-stable.
Chili sauce belongs to the great American tomato-preserving wave of the second half of the nineteenth century, when the late-summer glut produced ketchups, chow-chows, piccalillis and this looser, chunkier cousin in the same afternoon's work. Its name is generally traced to the chile peppers that distinguish it from plain tomato ketchup rather than to any Mexican dish, and the sweet-spice cabinet used here — cloves, cinnamon, ginger, allspice, nutmeg — is the same one that scented mincemeat and spiced fruit, a reminder that spiced tomato condiments arrived as relatives of sweet pickles, not of hot sauce.