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Hot Sauce
Scald ripe, sound tomatoes, peel and weigh them; to five pounds add one pound of onions peeled and sliced, five ounces of fresh red peppers, weighed after the seeds are taken out and then chopped fine, four ounces of brown sugar, two tablespoonfuls of salt and one pint of vinegar. Put all these ingredients over the fire in a porcelain-lined pan and boil slowly, stirring frequently to prevent burning, and after the sauce begins to boil it must be stirred almost incessantly. It should be boiled until it is about the consistency of apple sauce. When it has cooked enough remove the pan from the fire, let the sauce cool in it, then bottle it and cork the bottles tight.
This is a tomato-pepper table sauce of the ketchup family, and the cooking itself is straightforward. The problem is entirely in the last sentence: the sauce is cooled in the open pan, then bottled and corked for storage.
- Why the bottling failsThe sauce is allowed to cool uncovered before it goes into the bottles, so anything that settles on it during cooling is sealed in at room temperature. There is no sterilisation of the bottles, no hot fill, and no boiling-water process, so nothing in the procedure destroys spores or creates a vacuum seal.
- Corks are not a sealA driven cork holds pressure but is not hermetic and is not sterile; other recipes of the period often add a layer of wax or mutton fat over the cork, which this one omits. A corked bottle of vegetable puree of unverified acidity, held at cellar temperature, is the sort of anaerobic environment in which Clostridium botulinum can produce toxin.
- The acidity is unverifiedOne pint of vinegar to five pounds of tomatoes plus a pound of onions and five ounces of peppers gives no assurance of a pH at or below 4.6, and the acidity of tomatoes varies by variety and ripeness. Onions and peppers are both low-acid and they make up a substantial share of the finished weight. Use a current tested recipe for tomato sauce or salsa if you want to put this up.
- Fresh red peppers"Fresh red peppers" is unspecific and could cover anything from ripe sweet pods to hot ones; the recipe gives no way to tell which was meant. Five ounces of seeded flesh out of roughly six pounds of vegetables is a modest proportion, so the heat will depend entirely on which pepper is used.
- Porcelain-lined panThe instruction is about reactivity, not luxury: tinned copper and bare iron discolour tomatoes and pick up a metallic taste from the vinegar. Enamelled cast iron or stainless steel does the same job.
- The consistency cue"About the consistency of apple sauce" is the only doneness test given, and it is a good one; the sauce must reduce far enough to mound on a spoon. Expect a long, slow reduction, and note that the original is right that it will scorch the moment it thickens, which is why the stirring becomes constant.
- YieldFive pounds of tomatoes with the onions and peppers reduces to roughly three pints of finished sauce, depending on how far it is taken.
Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) belongs to the moment when American "hot sauce" still meant a thick, sweet-sour tomato relish in the ketchup and chili-sauce family rather than a thin bottle of fermented chile and vinegar. Recipes of this shape — scalded and peeled tomatoes, onions, red pods, brown sugar, salt and vinegar, boiled down and bottled — run through nineteenth-century American household manuals under the names chili sauce, tomato catsup and hot sauce more or less interchangeably, and the differences between them are mostly a matter of how finely the vegetables were chopped and how much pepper went in. The airy confidence about corking the bottles is characteristic of the era: safe home preserving practice, with tested acidities and measured processing times, was worked out only in the following decades.