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Oude Sauce
C. Kennicott.
One pint green tomatoes, six peppers (not large); four onions, chop together; add one cup salt, and let it stand over night; in the morning, drain off the water; add one cup sugar, one cup horse-radish, one tablespoon ground cloves, one tablespoon cinnamon, cover with vinegar, and stew gently all day.
A green-tomato relish of the chow-chow family, salted overnight and then cooked down in spiced vinegar. The whole character of the dish depends on how you handle two things: the enormous quantity of salt, and the vagueness of "stew gently all day."
- The salt is a brine, not a seasoningA full cup of salt on the chopped tomatoes, peppers and onions together is there to draw out water overnight. Drain thoroughly in the morning, and rinse the vegetables as well — the recipe does not say to, but without a rinse the finished sauce is likely to be too salty for modern palates.
- "One pint green tomatoes"A volume measure of chopped fruit, about 12 oz to 1 lb of unripe tomatoes. Green here means unripe, not a green-when-ripe variety; the firmness and acidity are the point.
- Six peppers, unspecifiedGenuinely ambiguous. In a book of this period and place, "peppers (not large)" most likely means mild green bell or bullnose types rather than chilies — six small sweet peppers is the safer reading. If you use hot peppers, start with one or two.
- Horse-radishA cup of freshly grated root. Its pungency is volatile and will largely cook away over a long simmer, leaving an earthy sweetness rather than heat. Reserve a spoonful or two to stir in at the end if you want the bite.
- VinegarCider vinegar suits the spicing; use a standard 5 percent acidity. "Cover with vinegar" means just enough to submerge the vegetables, perhaps 1 1/2 to 2 cups, topped up if the pan goes dry.
- All day is longer than neededOn a wood range "stew gently all day" meant hours at the back of the stove at a bare simmer. On a modern burner, 1 to 2 hours over low heat gets the vegetables tender and the liquid syrupy; much beyond that and the tomatoes disintegrate and the cloves turn bitter.
- SpicesA tablespoon each of ground cloves and cinnamon is assertive by current standards. Cloves in particular dominate — half quantities give a more balanced result.
- Yield and keepingExpect roughly 1 1/2 pints. The recipe gives no processing instructions, so treat the result as a refrigerator relish and use it within a few weeks; if you want shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested canning procedure for acidified relish.
The Home Cook Book (Chicago, J. Fred. Waggoner), which circulated in editions from the mid-1870s, was compiled from contributions by named local women, and this one carries the Kennicott name, well known in the Chicago area at the time. The odd title is generally traced to Oudh — Awadh, the north Indian province much in the British news of the period — though the spelling drifted. What is unmistakable is the form: green tomatoes, onions and peppers salted overnight, then stewed in sweetened, spiced vinegar. This is the American chow-chow and piccalilli tradition, born of the need to use the tomato crop that would never ripen before frost, and of a table that expected something sharp alongside plain boiled and roasted meat.