Home › Pickles › Shirley Sauce
Shirley Sauce
One dozen ripe tomatoes, one onion, three red small peppers without the seeds, two cupfuls of vinegar, three tablespoonfuls of sugar, two tablespoonfuls salt; put all together and cook slowly for three hours.
A cooked tomato sauce of the ketchup family, thickened by long reduction rather than by any thickener. The recipe assumes you will chop and cook it down to a pulp, then bottle it.
- What a dozen tomatoes meansA dozen ripe ones is roughly 3 to 4 lb. Peel them if you want a smooth sauce, or press the finished sauce through a sieve at the end.
- CupfulsTwo cupfuls of vinegar is 16 fl oz. Cider vinegar is a plausible match for the vinegar such a kitchen would have kept; anything around 5 percent acidity works.
- The peppers"Three red small peppers" most likely means small fresh hot chilies, not sweet bell peppers, and the recipe's own instruction to remove the seeds points to keeping the heat moderate. Three fresh cayennes or red serranos give about the right level for this volume.
- Salt is high by modern habitTwo tablespoons of salt in roughly a quart of finished sauce is well above modern seasoning levels. Start with one and taste as it reduces, since the salt concentrates along with everything else.
- Cook slowly, uncoveredThe three hours is a reduction, and it only works with the lid off over low heat. Stir the bottom regularly once it thickens; tomato and sugar scorch quickly and a burnt note runs through the whole batch.
- Chop before you startThe recipe says only "put all together", but chop the onion and tomatoes first. Whole tomatoes will collapse eventually; the onion distributes better finely chopped.
- Yield and keepingExpect about a pint and a half to a quart. Treat it as a refrigerator sauce: cool it, bottle it, and keep it chilled, using it within a month or two. The recipe gives no processing instructions, so follow a current tested method if you want shelf-stable jars.
Sauces of this type — tomato, onion, vinegar, sugar, salt, and heat, simmered down for hours — fill the pickle chapters of American cookbooks from the 1870s through the First World War, when the late-summer tomato glut had to be turned into something that would last the winter. They are ancestors of bottled ketchup, which was made at home as well as bought; the commercial product gradually displaced the household version as preserving standards and mass canning caught up in the early twentieth century. Names like "Shirley Sauce" are often said to have been borrowed from a contributor, a household, or a place rather than describing anything about the dish, though this is convention rather than documented practice, and this one has no documented origin beyond its appearance in collections of this kind. The recipe's most telling detail is its brevity: it assumes a cook who already knows what a finished bottled sauce should look like and needs only the proportions.