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Tomato Chili Sauce
Mrs. H. Baird.
Nine ripe tomatoes, peeled and cut small, red peppers and one onion chopped fine, one teacup vinegar, two tablespoons brown sugar, one tablespoon salt, one teaspoon ginger, one of cloves, one of allspice, vinegar in last : stew one hour.
A short, blunt nineteenth-century chili sauce: fruit, aromatics, sweet-sour base, three warm spices. The only real work is judging when it has reduced enough.
- TeacupA teacup in this period is roughly 3/4 cup, not a modern 8-oz mug. Err on the smaller side; the sauce can be loosened later with more vinegar.
- "Red peppers" is genuinely vagueNo quantity is given, and the term covered everything from sweet red bell peppers to small hot cayennes. Two large sweet red peppers plus one hot pepper gives a sauce in the spirit of the original; taste as you go rather than trusting a number.
- Ginger, cloves, allspiceMeasured by the teaspoon, which implies ground rather than whole, though the recipe does not say so. A teaspoon each of clove and allspice against nine tomatoes is assertive by modern taste; start with half if you prefer.
- The contradictory vinegarVinegar appears in the ingredient list and then again as "vinegar in last." The intent is to stew the vegetables in their own juice and add the vinegar near the end, which keeps the sharpness bright rather than cooking it flat.
- Peeling the tomatoesScore the skins and drop them in boiling water for 30 seconds, then into cold water; the skins slip off. Skins left in will curl into tough threads through the finished sauce.
- One hour is a minimumAn hour of stewing on a modern burner may still leave the sauce watery, since tomato varieties differ in juice. Cook uncovered until a spoon drawn across the pan leaves a track that closes slowly.
- Yield and keepingNine tomatoes reduce to roughly a pint, give or take. Treat it as a refrigerator sauce, good for two or three weeks, unless you are following a current tested canning procedure; the recipe gives no canning instructions of its own.
Chili sauce in nineteenth-century American cookbooks is generally not a hot sauce in the modern sense but a chunky spiced tomato relish, a near relation of ketchup before ketchup was standardized and bottled. Recipes of this kind are common in community and church cookbooks of the later nineteenth century, when home gardens produced more tomatoes than a family could eat fresh. The vinegar, sugar, salt and warm spices did the preserving work, and the attribution to Mrs. H. Baird is typical of the genre: such books were often collections gathered from the women of a congregation or a town, each contribution signed.