Home › Catsups And Sauces › Chili Sauce
Chili Sauce
Twelve large ripe tomatoes, four ripe or three green peppers, two onions, two table-spoons salt, two of sugar, one of cinnamon, three cups vinegar; peel tomatoes and onions, chop (separately) very fine, add the peppers (chopped) with the other ingredients, and boil one and a half hours. Bottle and it will keep a long time. Stone jugs are better than glass cans. One quart of canned tomatoes may be used instead of the ripe ones. This Chili sauce is excellent and much better and more healthful than catsups. -Mrs. E. W. Her. rick,
A straightforward vinegar preserve that needs almost no translation, with two caveats: the peppers are milder than the name suggests, and the storage advice is a century out of date.
- What the peppers areNineteenth-century American "chili sauce" was mild. Four ripe or three green peppers here means large sweet or mildly hot pod peppers of the bell and long-green type, not modern jalapenos or habaneros. If you want heat, add it deliberately rather than assuming the original was fiery.
- Quantities in weightTwelve large ripe tomatoes is somewhere in the region of 4 to 6 lb, depending on how large 'large' was. Note that the one-quart canned substitution offered as an equivalent is a good deal less than that, so the intended scale is elastic; judge the finished quantity by eye after the long boil.
- Vinegar strengthThree cups is a lot of liquid to reduce, and household vinegar of the period varied in strength. The recipe does not say which vinegar; standard 5 percent cider vinegar is a safe modern choice and suits the tomato better than distilled white.
- The cinnamonOne tablespoon of ground cinnamon in this volume is assertive by current taste. It is not an error, but if you prefer the tomato and pepper forward, start with a teaspoon or two and adjust near the end of cooking.
- Chopping separatelyThe recipe gives no reason for the instruction. In practice, keeping the onion off the same board as the tomato makes it easier to get the onion genuinely fine without reducing the tomato to slurry, which may be all that is meant.
- The hour and a halfThis is a reduction, not a simmer for safety's sake. Cook uncovered at a lazy boil, stir the bottom often once it thickens, and judge by consistency rather than the clock: it should mound slightly on a spoon. Scorched tomato at the base will flavour the whole batch.
- Storage, updatedFilling stone jugs or bottles straight from the pot and sealing them is open-kettle canning, which modern practice has abandoned because nothing sterilises the headspace or the closure. Treat this as a refrigerator sauce, keeping it in clean jars for a few weeks, or process it by a current tested water-bath procedure for tomato relishes.
- "More healthful than catsups"A live argument in the 1880s. Commercial bottled catsups of the day were routinely stretched and preserved with salicylic acid, benzoate of soda and coal-tar colouring, and home cooks were often urged to make their own for that reason.
Chili sauce in the American sense has little to do with Mexican salsa: it is a spiced tomato preserve, thicker and chunkier than catsup because the fruit is chopped rather than strained, and it belongs to the same family of vinegar puts-up as piccalilli and tomato relish. It spread through community cookbooks in the later nineteenth century, when a household that had grown tomatoes had to do something with all of them in the same fortnight. The Dixie Cook Book gathers its recipes under contributors' names, and this one is credited to Mrs. E. W. Herrick, whose closing remark about catsups being less healthful reflects a widespread distrust of adulterated commercial condiments in the years before federal food regulation. The mention of stone jugs as better than glass cans is a small period detail worth noticing, though the recipe does not say why she preferred them.