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Tomato Sauce
Mrs. C. S. Horseman.
Thirty-six ripe tomatoes, six green peppers, two onion chopped fine, two cups of sugar, two tablespoons of sal two teaspoons of ground cloves, two teaspoons of mustard two teaspoons of cinnamon, two cups of vinegar, and boil half a day.
A cooked tomato condiment of the sort nineteenth-century books called sauce, catsup or chili sauce interchangeably. The text has come through with some words clipped — "two tablespoons of sal" is salt, and "two teaspoons of mustard" means dry ground mustard.
- Scale it downThirty-six ripe tomatoes is roughly 12 to 15 lb, a canning-day quantity. A third of the recipe (12 tomatoes, 2 peppers, and the seasonings divided by three) fits an ordinary large pot and still fills several jars.
- Peel and seed the tomatoesThe recipe is silent on it, though many period sauce recipes assume it. Score, blanch 30 seconds, slip the skins; loose skins will not soften in cooking and will roll up into tough spirals.
- "Green peppers"In an American book of this period this most likely means unripe sweet bell peppers rather than chilies. Six for 36 tomatoes gives a mild sauce. Modern chili sauce recipes often add heat, but that is a departure from what is written here.
- Boil half a dayThe point is reduction, not sterility. Cook uncovered over low heat until the volume drops by roughly half and a spoon drawn across the bottom leaves a track — three to five hours on a modern burner, less if you started with fewer tomatoes. Stir often once it thickens, since sugar at this concentration scorches.
- Spices go in lateCloves and cinnamon lose their aroma over a boil this long and can go muddy. If you prefer, add them, and the mustard, in the last 30 to 45 minutes rather than at the start.
- Salt and vinegarTwo tablespoons of salt is a modest amount for this quantity of tomatoes. The two cups of vinegar carry the preservation; use 5% acidity cider or white vinegar and add it in the second half of cooking so less of it boils off.
- StorageThe book gives no directions for putting it up, and the vinegar alone is not a guarantee once the sauce is diluted by tomato juice. Refrigerate and use within a few weeks, or follow a current tested water-bath procedure for tomato-based sauces rather than improvising.
- YieldThe full recipe gives somewhere near 4 to 5 pints after reduction, depending on how juicy the tomatoes were.
The Home Cook Book (Chicago, mid-1870s) was compiled from contributions by named local women and sold for charity — one of the earliest American community cookbooks, and the reason this page carries Mrs. C. S. Horseman's name rather than an author's. Sauces like this one belong to the late-summer glut, when a household with a garden faced more ripe tomatoes than it could eat and turned them into sweet-spiced vinegar condiments to last the winter. The template — tomatoes, onion, sweet peppers, sugar, vinegar, cloves and cinnamon, boiled down for hours — is the same one behind bottled chili sauce and commercial tomato ketchup, which through the 1870s is often said to have been more a home product than a purchased one.