Home › Pickles and Relishes › Red-Pepper Relish
Red-Pepper Relish
12 red peppers
1 quart vinegar
12 green peppers
2 cups sugar
3 large onions
1½ 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-sour pepper relish of the type every early twentieth-century household put up in late summer. The recipe is sound; the only part that has been overtaken by modern practice is the sealing and storage.
- Sealing and storage"Pack in clean, hot glass jars" is open-kettle canning, which is no longer considered adequate for shelf storage — the jars are not processed, so the seal is unreliable and surface mold or yeast can take hold. Treat this as a refrigerator relish, used within a few weeks, or follow a current tested boiling-water-bath procedure for pepper relish if you want it on the pantry shelf.
- How many peppersAny sweet red pepper works; "red pepper" here means ripe sweet pepper, not chili.
- Vinegar strengthUse vinegar labeled 5 percent acidity, which is standard cider or white distilled vinegar. Wine vinegars and specialty vinegars can run lower and will make the relish both flatter and less stable.
- The two scaldingsThe successive pours of boiling water are not idle repetition — they soften the pepper skins and pull out some of the raw grassy bite, so the finished relish tastes sweeter. Drain well both times or the syrup will be thin.
- OnionsThree "large" onions means about 1½ lb. Chop them the same coarseness as the peppers; they go in raw and cook only in the final ten minutes.
- Total cooking timeTen minutes at a boil is deliberately short and should be respected. Longer cooking turns the peppers olive-drab and limp, and the point of this relish is that the pieces stay distinct.
- YieldIt is meant as a condiment for cold meat, sausage, beans or cheese — a tablespoon or two per serving.
Sweet pepper relishes multiplied in American cookbooks in the decades either side of 1900, as sweet bell peppers became a reliable market-garden crop and home canning shifted from the crock to the glass jar. Butterick, better known for dress patterns, published household books aimed at the same middle-class reader who bought its magazines, and the Pickles and Relishes chapter reflects a period preoccupation with putting up the late-summer glut: cucumbers, green tomatoes, cabbage, and peppers in every combination. Relishes of this red-and-green type were sometimes served under the name "pepper hash," and the deliberate pairing of colors was as much for the look on the table as for the flavor. The heavy hand with sugar — two cups to a quart of vinegar — is often taken as a sign of an American rather than an English pickle, though sweet English pickles of the same era existed.