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Chili Sauce
Chop twelve green peppers and eight large onions very fine, place them in a saucepan with four dozen peeled tomatoes, sixteen tablespoonfuls of moist sugar, six of salt and six breakfast cupfuls of vinegar. Set the saucepan on the fire and boil gently for an hour. Let the mixture cool and pour it into jars and cover over; it is then ready for use. Of course a smaller quantity can be made by simply reducing the quantity of the ingredients.
This is a large-batch tomato condiment in the ketchup family, and the original quantities fill a canning kettle. The two things to settle before starting are how much it makes and how it should be stored.
- Storage is the hingeCooling the sauce and then ladling it into covered jars is not a canning process, and the finished sauce should not be kept at room temperature. Refrigerate it and use it within a few weeks, or freeze it; for shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested chili-sauce recipe with its own measured vinegar ratio and processing time.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is a large teacup, generally reckoned at 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Six of them is roughly 6 to 7 cups of vinegar; use plain cider or white vinegar of 5 percent acidity.
- Moist sugarMoist sugar is unrefined or partly refined sugar with the molasses still in it, closest today to light brown sugar. Sixteen tablespoons is one cup, packed.
- Four dozen tomatoesForty-eight peeled tomatoes of the period run to something like 12 to 15 lb, or about 6 quarts of chopped pulp. Peel them by dipping in boiling water for 30 seconds, and drain off some of the watery juice if you want to shorten the cooking.
- Green peppersThese are green bell peppers, not chilies, and twelve will run to roughly 3 to 4 lb. This particular recipe contains no chile heat at all, only the name; add cayenne if you want any.
- An hour is optimisticAt full quantity a gentle boil for one hour leaves a thin, soupy sauce. Expect two to three hours of steady simmering, stirring often as it thickens, until a spoonful drawn across the pan holds its channel.
- Yield and scalingReduced to the thickness described above, the full batch gives roughly 3 to 5 quarts. Quartering it, to 12 tomatoes, 3 peppers, 2 onions, a quarter cup sugar, 1 1/2 tablespoons salt and 1 1/2 cups vinegar, is a manageable evening's work.
- Pan and spice bagUse a wide non-reactive pot, stainless or enamel; the vinegar will pit bare cast iron or aluminum and pick up a metallic taste over a long boil.
Chili sauce was one of the standard American bottled condiments of the late nineteenth century, a coarser cousin of tomato ketchup: same tomatoes, vinegar and sugar, but chopped rather than strained, so the peppers and onions stay visible. Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maitre d'hotel whose name carried the Waldorf's kitchen into print in 1896, includes it among the book's put-up stores, at a period when commercially bottled chili sauce was also being sold by Heinz and others. The recipe's closing line, that a smaller quantity can be made by reducing the ingredients, suggests the book was aimed at domestic readers as much as at professional cooks working at hotel scale.