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Bordeaux Sauce
One gallon vinegar, two gallons tomatoes chopped fine, two quarts of cabbage, one dozen onions all chopped fine together, one ounce white mustard seed, one ounce of pepper corns, one-half ounce ground allspice and cloves together, one ounce of celery seed, one gill common salt, one ounce turmeric dissolved, two pounds light brown sugar. Mix together and boil all together one-half hour.
A tomato-and-cabbage relish of the chow-chow family, written for a household that put up pickles by the crock. The quantities are the first thing to deal with.
- Yield, and cutting it downAs written this comes to roughly four gallons of finished relish, or about thirty pints. A quarter batch (1 qt vinegar, 2 qt chopped tomatoes, 2 cups cabbage, 3 onions, and a quarter of each spice measure) fits an ordinary 8-quart pot and yields around 7 pints.
- A gill of saltOne gill is half a cup. In the full batch that is a moderate seasoning rather than a curing dose; use plain pickling or kosher salt, since iodized salt clouds the brine.
- Turmeric "dissolved"Turmeric does not dissolve. Slake the ground spice in a few spoonfuls of the vinegar to a smooth paste before it goes in, or it will float in dry lumps and stain unevenly.
- Vinegar strengthNineteenth-century cider vinegar varied widely. Use a commercial vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity and do not dilute it; the acid is what keeps this relish.
- Whole spicesThe mustard seed, peppercorns and celery seed are meant to stay whole and be eaten. If you would rather not bite into peppercorns, tie them in a spice bag and lift it out at the end.
- Half an hour is a starting pointThirty minutes at a full boil will soften the vegetables but leaves the sauce loose, since tomatoes are mostly water. Simmer on until it mounds slightly on a spoon, stirring often once it thickens, as the sugar scorches easily.
- StorageThe recipe stops at the boil and says nothing about sealing. Treat it as a refrigerator relish, good several weeks in clean covered jars, or follow a current tested tomato-relish canning procedure for shelf storage; do not simply pour it hot into jars and set them aside.
- ServingSharp, sweet and mustard-yellow. It belongs beside cold meat, sausages, beans or fried fish, in spoonfuls rather than ladles.
Recipes titled "Bordeaux sauce" turn up as a tomato pickle in American cookbooks of the period, and they have little to do with the wine sauces of French cookery; the name is generally taken to be borrowed prestige, the same impulse that put "Chili sauce" on a boiled tomato ketchup. What this actually is is a chow-chow: chopped garden vegetables cooked down in vinegar and sugar with mustard seed, celery seed and turmeric, the standard end-of-summer method for using tomatoes and cabbage that would not keep. The turmeric contributes both flavour and colour, and is often said to descend from English piccalilli.