Chili Sauce
Twelve ripe tomatoes peeled and sliced; mince four ripe or three green peppers and two onions, two tablespoonfuls salt, three of sugar, one tablespoonful of cinnamon, three cupfuls of vinegar. Do not strain tomatoes, but chop onions, peppers and tomatoes fine. Boil one hour and a half. This can be made at any time by using one quart of canned tomatoes.
A chunky, unstrained tomato condiment of the ketchup family, closer to a relish than to anything hot. The recipe is workable as written, but it assumes a kitchen that knew what "peppers" meant and had a crock in a cold cellar.
- What the peppers areIn turn-of-the-century American receipts "ripe or green peppers" usually means sweet bell peppers, red or unripened green, rather than chilies, though the text does not say. Little or no heat is expected here; if you want warmth, that is a deliberate departure.
- Quantities in weightTwelve ripe tomatoes is roughly 4 to 4 1/2 lb of medium fruit. The quart of canned tomatoes offered as a substitute is appreciably less than that by weight, so the winter version will be a smaller, wetter batch. Two onions means two medium yellow onions, about 3/4 lb.
- PeelingThirty seconds in boiling water and a plunge into cold slips the skins off. Skins left in will not dissolve over the boil and show up as curls in the finished sauce.
- The cinnamonA full tablespoon of ground cinnamon in this volume is assertive by modern taste and will also cloud the sauce. Period "cinnamon" was frequently cassia; a teaspoon or two gives the warm note without the muddiness.
- Vinegar strengthUse ordinary cider vinegar at 5 percent acidity. Period vinegar varied in strength, so the original's three cupfuls is not a precise guide; do not substitute a mild wine vinegar, since the acid is doing preserving work here as much as flavoring.
- The hour and a halfThis is a reduction, not a cooking time. Uncovered, stirred often toward the end, the pan should go from soupy to thick enough that a spoon drawn across the bottom leaves a track that closes slowly. Scorching in the last twenty minutes is the usual failure.
- Yield and keepingExpect about 3 to 4 cups. The recipe gives no sealing or processing instructions, so treat the result as a refrigerator condiment: cool, jar, refrigerate, and use within a month. For shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested tomato-relish canning procedure rather than this text.
- ServingIt was eaten cold or at room temperature alongside meats. It is thick enough to spoon rather than pour.
Chili sauce in nineteenth-century American cookery is a tomato preserve, not a pepper one: the name attached to a family of spiced, vinegared tomato condiments that stood beside ketchup on the same table, distinguished mainly by being left chunky where ketchup was strained smooth. Vinegar, salt and sugar are the preserving agents, and the dish belongs to the late-summer glut when a household put up whatever the garden produced all at once. The concluding line about canned tomatoes is the more interesting detail: commercially canned tomatoes made it possible for a cook to make a "put-up" condiment out of season, which quietly undercuts the whole seasonal logic of the recipe.