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Chili Sauce
1 peck ripe tomatoes, finely chopped. 12 onions (size of egg) finely chopped. 1/2 tablespoon allspice. 6 green peppers (small) finely chopped 1 pint brown sugar 1 pint vinegar 3 tablespoons salt tablespoon allspice 1 tablespoon cinnamon tablespoon cloves teaspoon paprika Mix the first six ingredients together and cook until nearly done, before adding the spices. 1/2 tablespoon cloves. 1/2 teaspoon paprika.
The printed text has clearly lost some type: it names "the first six ingredients" but lists peppers, sugar, vinegar and salt as only four, and several spice quantities have dropped their fractions. Read it as a framework rather than a formula.
- The missing ingredientsAmerican chili sauce of this period is usually built on ripe tomatoes, often with onion, and neither appears here. Something along those lines would be needed to reach six ingredients before the spices, but the amounts are guesswork: the printed text supplies none.
- Missing fractions"tablespoon allspice," "tablespoon cloves" and "teaspoon paprika" carry no figure at all, and leading fractions have most likely dropped out in setting. A full tablespoon of ground cloves would dominate everything, so a much smaller quantity is the safer reading, though what was originally intended cannot be recovered.
- A pint is a measure of volumeA pint of brown sugar is 2 cups, about 14 oz packed. A pint of vinegar is 2 cups. Cider vinegar was commonly used in American preserving of this period and suits the sugar better than distilled white.
- Green peppersThese are sweet bell peppers, not chilies. The heat in the sauce comes only from the paprika and spices, which is why the result is sweet-sour rather than hot.
- Spices go in last, and whyThe one instruction the recipe does give is the important one. Ground spices simmered for the full hour or more of reduction turn muddy and bitter, and cloves in particular go medicinal. Add them in the last ten to fifteen minutes.
- Judging "nearly done"The mixture should reduce until a spoon drawn across the pan bottom leaves a track that fills in slowly, roughly 45 to 90 minutes of open simmering depending on how juicy the tomatoes are. Stir often once it thickens; the sugar scorches easily.
- Salt levelThree tablespoons is a generous, preserving-scale quantity, though the recipe says nothing about why. If you are making a small batch for the refrigerator, start with one tablespoon and adjust at the end.
- Yield and keepingYield depends on what has dropped out of the ingredient list, so no reliable figure can be given. The original gives no sealing instructions, so treat it as a refrigerator condiment, good for a month or so. For shelf storage, follow a current tested water-bath canning recipe rather than this one, which specifies no jar processing at all.
- ServingIts place in the poultry and left-over meats chapter is the clue: it is a relish for cold roast fowl, meat loaf, croquettes and hash, spooned on at the table.
Chili sauce in the American sense is a thick, sweet-sour tomato relish, closer to a chunky ketchup than to anything hot, and it was a fixture of home preserving from the late nineteenth century onward, when the autumn glut of ripe tomatoes had to be dealt with in a week or two. The name is often said to reflect the chili peppers that flavoured early versions, though many early recipes already used mild green peppers, leaving the sweetness of brown sugar and the bite of vinegar to do the work. The Metropolitan Cook Book was one of the free booklets that Metropolitan Life Insurance distributed to policyholders, part of a broader early twentieth-century effort by insurers to promote household thrift and nutrition, and its placement of this sauce among poultry and left-over meats is telling: a jar of something sharp on the shelf was what made a second appearance of Sunday's chicken worth eating.