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Chili Sauce
Pare twelve large tomatoes, and chop them fine; peel two good-sized onions, and chop them also; chop very fine four medium-sized green peppers. Cut up each kind of vegetable separately. Stir all together, and add as follows: Two tablespoons of salt; two tablespoons of sugar; one tablespoon of cinnamon; three teacups of vinegar. Boil one and one-half hour, stirring well, and bottle the same as catsup. This sauce gives a delicious zest to any sort of cold meat.
COLD TOMATO CATSUP-A recipe used in the kitchen of General Washington is the following: Take one peck of ripe tomatoes and grate them over a coarse grater; strain through a wire sieve; put the liquor in a bag and let drip; take the pulp and thin with one pint of vinegar. Season with salt, pepper, garlic, allspice, and cloves. Bottle and seal. This catsup retains the taste of the fresh tomatoes and is an excellent flavoring for soups and sauces.
Two recipes share this entry, and both fail on preservation rather than on cookery. The reasons differ, and the second is the more serious.
- The cold catsup is never heated at allGrated raw tomato, thinned with vinegar and seasoned by eye, then "bottle and seal" — nothing in the process reaches a temperature that kills anything. A sealed, airless bottle of low-acid vegetable pulp held at room temperature is the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum, which grows without oxygen and produces a toxin you cannot see, smell or taste.
- The acid is unmeasuredOne pint of vinegar to a peck of tomatoes is a small quantity of acid against a large and undefined quantity of pulp, and the strength of household vinegar in this period is unknowable. Safe tomato preserving depends on a measured, verified pH below 4.6; this recipe gives no ratio you can rely on and no way to check it.
- "Bottle the same as catsup" is not a processThe chili sauce at least boils for an hour and a half, but the book assumes a bottling method it never describes. Whatever was meant, nothing here produces a vacuum or a sterile headspace, and both recipes are better set aside in favour of a current tested tomato-sauce or chili-sauce recipe with specified jar size and processing time.
- Modern tomatoes are lower in acidModern tomatoes may be lower in acid -- Some cultivars are reported to sit above the pH 4.6 line, which is why current canning guidance calls for added acid in tomato products. A recipe written before that guidance cannot be assumed to land in the safe range.
- A peckA dry peck of tomatoes runs about 12 to 13 lb, a quarter of a bushel. Worth knowing for reading the book, not for making this.
- A teacupIn American cookbooks of this period a teacup is usually reckoned at about six fluid ounces, three-quarters of a modern cup, as against the eight-ounce breakfast cup. Three teacups of vinegar is therefore about 18 fluid ounces, a little over a pint, rather than the 24 fluid ounces three modern cups would give.
- A tablespoon of cinnamonNot a misprint, and not a mistake in period terms — nineteenth-century chili sauces were spiced heavily and read as sweet-spiced rather than hot. The green peppers here are sweet or mildly hot frying peppers, not chilies in the modern sense.
Chili sauce in American cookery has little to do with chili peppers as we now use them: it names a thick, sweet-spiced tomato relish, closer to a chunky catsup than to a hot sauce, and it was a familiar presence in the pickle chapters of nineteenth-century household cookbooks. The Butterick book, published by a pattern company, follows the convention of the era in offering both a boiled sauce and an uncooked one, and in attaching the second to George Washington's kitchen. That attribution is traditional rather than documented — "a recipe used in the kitchen of General Washington" was a common piece of nineteenth-century culinary flattery. What the cold version does record honestly is the appeal of a raw catsup: before commercial bottling dominated, cooks valued a preserve that still tasted of the fresh fruit, and were willing to accept a keeping quality that no one would accept now.