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Chili Sauce
Place in a small saucepan two tablespoons cold water, one tablespoon butter, one saltspoon salt and two saltspoons paprika; place on the fire and as soon as it comes to a boil add four tablespoons chili sauce, one teaspoon Worcestershire sauce and half gill tomato sauce. Mix well and let boil for five minutes, pour into a sauce bowl and serve.
A quick compound sauce built on bottled condiments rather than made from scratch, of the sort served alongside broiled meat, chops or fried fish. It comes together in under ten minutes.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So one saltspoon salt is 1/4 teaspoon, and two saltspoons paprika is 1/2 teaspoon.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of tomato sauce is 1/4 cup (2 fl oz).
- What "chili sauce" means hereNot hot sauce. In American cookery of this period chili sauce is the thick, sweet-tart bottled tomato relish with onion, vinegar and mild spice, close to a chunky ketchup. Substituting a vinegar-and-cayenne pepper sauce will make the dish inedibly sharp.
- Tomato sauceRead this as a plain cooked tomato sauce or tomato purée thinned slightly, not a herbed Italian pasta sauce. Canned tomato purée or passata is the closest modern equivalent.
- The five-minute boilFive minutes of boiling reduces and marries the mixture. With only a tablespoon of butter in a largely tomato base, some fat may rise to the surface; stirring before serving will recombine it.
- PaprikaMost likely a sweet paprika rather than a hot one. Smoked paprika would dominate the sauce and is not what is meant here.
- YieldThe ingredients come to a little over 2/3 cup before cooking, rather less after the five-minute boil; enough for a few modest servings as a table sauce.
- Seasoning at the endBottled chili sauce and Worcestershire both carry salt, so taste before adding the full saltspoon rather than after.
Bottled chili sauce was a fixture of the American pantry by the turn of the twentieth century — a sweetened, spiced tomato relish sold alongside ketchup and Worcestershire, and often made at home in large batches at the end of tomato season. A recipe like this one is essentially a "made" sauce assembled in minutes from commercial condiments, enriched with butter and given a brief boil to marry it — quicker than a classical brown sauce. The paprika points to the same era's enthusiasm for Hungarian seasoning, which spread through professional kitchens in the decades either side of 1900 and turns up in a great many chafing-dish and grill sauces of the time.