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Shirley Sauce
Mrs. H. Baird.
Wash, peel, and slice two dozen ripe tomatoes, four large onions, and four green peppers, not too large; add four tablespoons sugar, one pint vinegar; boil tomatoes and onions first, strain, then boil all slowly till done.
A plain tomato-and-pepper sauce of the ketchup family, written for a cook who already knew what "done" looked like. The whole recipe hinges on the strain: the tomatoes and onions are cooked and pushed through a sieve first, so the seeds and skins never reach the finished sauce.
- QuantitiesTwo dozen ripe tomatoes is roughly 8-10 lb, which cooks down to about 2 to 3 pints of finished sauce. Four large onions is around 2 lb.
- The strainBoil the tomatoes and onions until fully collapsed, 30-40 minutes, then press through a sieve or food mill. The recipe gives no reason for straining before the vinegar and sugar go in, but that is the order it sets down.
- Green peppersAlmost certainly the sweet bell type rather than a hot chile. Remove seeds and ribs; the recipe's order implies they go in after straining, so chop them fine or the sauce will be coarse.
- VinegarThe recipe does not say which vinegar. Cider vinegar suits the sauce; distilled white will work but tastes sharper and flatter. Period vinegar strength was not standardised, so treat a modern 5 percent vinegar as an approximation.
- "Till done"Simmer uncovered until the sauce coats a spoon and a spatula drawn across the pan bottom leaves a track that closes slowly, typically 45 minutes to an hour and a half depending on how watery the tomatoes were. Stir often at the end; the sugar scorches.
- No salt in the originalSeason to taste as it reduces. Without salt this reads as sweet-sour tomato pulp rather than a sauce.
- Keeping itThe recipe gives no processing instructions and none should be improvised. Refrigerate and use within two weeks, or freeze. Shelf-stable canning of a low-acid vegetable mix like this needs a tested current recipe with measured added acid.
Sauces of this shape — tomatoes, onions, peppers, sugar and vinegar, cooked down and strained — filled the ketchup and catsup pages of nineteenth-century American cookbooks, where "ketchup" still meant any thin, keeping sauce made from a single dominant ingredient, whether mushroom, walnut, oyster or tomato. The name here is likely nothing more than a household name passed along with the recipe; The Home Cook Book was assembled from contributions by named local women, and Mrs. H. Baird's attribution is the whole of its provenance. What the recipe really records is the late-summer glut: two dozen tomatoes at once is a garden's worth, and boiling them down with vinegar and sugar was how a household carried that harvest into the winter before reliable home canning.