Grandma Renner’s Chili Sauce

Here’s another retro recipe for you! But first, I need to make a confession: I didn’t like this when I was a kid, when I had the opportunity to eat the chili sauce Grandma Renner herself had made! Now, of course, I kick myself for being such a little nitwit.

But I long ago copied the recipe from Mom’s collection, thinking I’d make it someday. But I had to go through some kind of phase where “real” chili sauces were viewed as somehow “better” than my own grandmother’s.

Maybe it’s a labeling problem: this really isn’t a true chili sauce. There aren’t any actual chilis in it! Bell peppers, green and red, but mostly it’s tomatoes. It’s a spicy tomato sauce. It’s basically chunky ketchup. There’s no heat to it at all.

If you look in church-lady cookbooks from the mid-twentieth century, you’ll find scads of recipes for “chili sauce” that are just like this: really, a tomato relish.

For our little Fourth of July feast, I decided to offer an alternative relish for our burgers, so I made up some of this. And boy, howdy—it’s pretty darned good!

You usually think of something piquant, tangy, tomatoey, and just . . . sharp tasting. Sharply tomatoey. But this has a good combination of flavors, vinegar, sugar.

Naturally, I didn’t follow the instructions to the letter. First, I made the “mistake” of not knowing that one is always supposed to blanch, peel, and deseed tomatoes used for sauce! What a nincompoop I am. (However, I do know that nutrients and flavor are in the skin and seeds, so unless I’m told not to, I tend to keep them in.)



After the initial hour of simmering, I could tell I’d have to run it through my food mill, and that would change the texture from how Grandma used to make it. But okay—I remember Grandma’s chili sauce being chunky and fairly watery, and I wanted mine to be more like a sauce—thicker, more ketchupy. So my “mistake” turned out to be a boon.

Grandma’s recipe calls for “red peppers,” too—I had to ask my mom what Grandma might have used. I mean, any hint of the word chili, and I’m inclined to use red chili peppers, those small, thin-skinned little firecrackers, like cayenne. But no, Mom told me it was more like a red bell pepper. Read: sweet red pepper.

I quartered Grandma’s recipe, since it was a maiden voyage, but next time, I’ll make a full batch and process it. Here’s why:



—It goes on nearly everything. Hamburgers, hot dogs, mac and cheese, baked potatoes, you name it—anything you’d maybe put ketchup on. I mean, just a hot dog or hamburger, a bun, and this stuff—and wow.

—Check this out: open a jar of sauerkraut, pull out enough kraut for however many servings you need, rinse and drain it, sprinkle caraway seeds on it, then spoon some of this relish in. Stir it up, then heat it. A microwave will do. Feed it to people who say they don’t like sauerkraut, and see if they don’t make an exception. Great as a side with brats and potatoes.

—You can use it as a salsa—a chip dip. Stir it in with yogurt or sour cream.

—Mix it with mayo and use as a dressing base for a pasta salad.

For this maiden voyage, I used greenhouse tomatoes—but I’ll bet it will be exponentially better made with red ripe summertime tomatoes! You might want to try it, too.

Here’s the recipe. Notes in [brackets] are by me.

Chilli Sauce
By Clara Renner

16 cups tomatoes (about large pot full)
6 sweet peppers [green bell peppers]
8 big onions [Mom said Grandma would’ve used yellow ones]

—Cook for 2 hours.
—Then, add and cook 1 hour longer:

2 cups vinegar [Grandma would have used apple cider vinegar]
3 red peppers [Mom said Grandma would’ve used sweet ones, such as red bell peppers]
2 Tbsp. mixed spices [Mom said these are pickling spices; I used McCormick, which must have some cinnamon in it—very delicious!]
2 cups sugar
1 Tbsp. salt
1 Tbsp. celery seed

—For catsup or sauce, use 1/2 tsp. ground red pepper, which you can use instead of 3 red peppers [okay, I added a little chili powder—the spice-blend kind you’d use for making chili—and I also used the red peppers as well.]



If you’re like me and you want to just try it out, below is the quartered recipe I used. I made an effort to cook it down.

Reduced Recipe
(makes about 3 pints)

4 cups tomatoes (approx. 4-5 tomatoes), chopped (next time, I’ll blanch and peel the skins off of them)
1 1/2 green bell peppers, chopped
2 regular-sized yellow onions, chopped [I figure what was a “large” onion in Grandma’s day is probably what we’d call a “medium.”]

—Cook for 2 hours in a heavy-based pan.
—Then, add the following and cook for 1 more hour or until as thick as you want:

1/2 cup apple cider vinegar
4 sweet red peppers (shape and size of jalapenos—but they’re sweet)
1/2 T. pickling spices
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 T. salt
1/4 T. celery seed

—Adjust seasonings to taste. I’m sure I added more pickling spices and celery seed, thinking my containers of them were rather old. I also added a pinch or so of chili powder.
—When it’s about as thick as you want, run it through a food mill if you want it to have a more homogenous texture.
—I didn’t preserve mine, but this recipe was born to be canned.

World’s Largest Catsup Bottle

It’s the Tangy-est!

Today we drove to Collinsville, Illinois, for the eleventh annual World’s Largest Catsup Bottle Festival.

Here’s the short history: Sixty years ago, the local water tower was built and painted to look like a big bottle of Brooks Catsup, because in 1949 Collinsville was the home of Brooks Foods and the G. S. Suppiger Company. And yes, the Brooks bottles had this shape back then.

The water tower eventually fell into disrepair but was restored, after a spirited community effort, in 1995; it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2002.

So they have these annual festivals to celebrate the funky roadside niftiness of the whole thing, the small town with the big 1949-style catsup bottle. Remember when catsup bottles were made of glass? Remember when Collinsville was the Brooks company’s headquarters? Remember when catsup didn’t have to vie with salsa as America’s favorite condiment? Remember when ketchup was spelled catsup?

So there is the reason to have a World’s Largest Catsup Bottle Festival—to soak for a while in the nostalgia of small-town midwestern Americana, to stroll through a vintage car show and groove to an Elvis impersonator, to watch a hotdog-eating contest, and enjoy the regal presence of the 2009 Little Princess Tomato and Sir Catsup as they mingled in the crowds with their parents.

All of this, set to the golden oldie tunes of KZQZ 1430 AM.

Remember the Pepsi Challenge taste test from the 1970s, where Pepsi would have booths at public events, like county fairs and such, serve people Coke and Pepsi in unmarked cups, and tasters were supposed to identify the better-tasting soda? As I recall, it quickly became an opportunity to simply demonstrate one’s ability to distinguish between the two.

Well, the festival today featured a “Brooks Tangy Catsup Taste Test,” where participants sampled four different catsups, with the goal of guessing which one was the Brooks. The other brands were Heinz, Hunt’s, and the local Schnuck’s store brand.

I tried it—and I won! And yes, Brooks is indeed the “tangy-est.”

And what did I win, you may ask?

I won a ribbon . . . a coupon for a trip to The Pasta House . . .

—and a free bottle of Brooks catsup!

Walnut Catsup

Building on the subject of the last post, I wanted to talk again about the old tome The Hearthstone; or, Life at Home: A Household Manual, by Laura C. Holloway, published in 1883. Google has the entire book available online, here.

You might remember me making fun of this book’s “Toast and Water” recipe some weeks ago. Turns out some retro recipes deserve to recede into dim history!

But we were talking about ketchup, or catsup, as some would spell it. (Editor’s note: Webster’s 11th Collegiate has ketchup as the first spelling, followed by catchup and catsup in that order, so among U.S. editors, ketchup would almost always be the preferred spelling. Unless you have a good reason to prefer one of the alternate spellings . . . such as when you’re quoting from an 1880s cookbook that spells it catsup throughout and don’t want to annoy your reader by switching back and forth a lot . . .)

So, there are a lot of catsup recipes in Holloway’s book, beginning on page 508, in a section called “Pickles and Catsups.” Here’s a list of the recipes in that section:

--To Pickle Lemons with the Peel on.
--To Pickle Lemons without the Peel.
--Knickerbocker Pickle [“for beef, mutton and pork”; recipe makes one hundred pounds of pickled meat].
--To Pickle Green Tomatoes.
--To Pickle Red Tomatoes.
--Indian or Yellow Pickle (Mrs. Reynolds’ recipe).
--Mangoes. [Not what you think! It is muskmelons stuffed “with mustard-seed, allspice, horseradish, small onions, etc., and sewed up” and pickled.]
--Mushrooms.
--Onion and Cucumber Pickles.
--To Pickle Gherkins.
--Nasturtiums.
--Pickled Grapes.
--To Pickle Peaches [3 different recipes for these].
--Pickled Peppers.
--Pickled Onions.
--Spanish Onions—Pickled.
--Pickled Plums [2 versions].
--East India Pickle [What the hey? It’s cabbage, onions, horseradish, green peppers, vinegar, mace, cloves, allspice, cinnamon, alum, and salt.]
--English Pickles.
--To Pickle Eggs.
--Universal Pickle.
--A Tennessee Recipe for Tomato Catsup (1) [I think Holloway was from Tennessee; no wonder she lists it first].
--Tomato Catsup (2).
--Tomato Catsup (3) (Mrs. Reynolds’ recipe).
--Tomato Catsup (4) [Yes! Four different recipes for tomato catsup! Glory!].
--Cucumber Catsup.
--Walnut Catsup.
--To Make Curry Powder.

. . . So, are we scared yet, or intrigued? My home-canning skills are pretty minimal, so if I attempted to put up any of these, you should be very afraid. But I think it would nifty if a skilled home-canner explored some of these recipes and used modern (trustworthy) canning materials and techniques to produce some recipes from history.

For fun, and because I’ll be talking more along these lines shortly, here is Holloway’s recipe for Walnut Catsup, found on pages 515–14 of her book. No, there are no paragraph breaks. (Her book was going to be long enough as it was, huh?)

Walnut Catsup.—One hundred walnuts, one handful of salt, one quart of vinegar, one-quarter of an ounce of mace, one-quarter of an ounce of cloves, one-quarter of an ounce of ginger, one-quarter of an ounce of whole black pepper, a small piece of horseradish, twenty shallots, one-quarter of a pound of anchovies, one pint of port wine; procure the walnuts at a time when you can run a pin through them; slightly bruise, and put them into a jar with the salt and vinegar; let them stand eight days, stirring every day; then drain the liquor from them and boil it, with the above ingredients, for about half an hour; it may be strained or not, as preferred, and, if required, a little more vinegar or wine can be added, according to taste. When bottled well, seal the corks.

Poking a pin through the walnut is the way to tell if the nut inside is still soft enough to be pickled and eaten; if the pin can’t penetrate, then the shells have formed too hard inside. Which, truth be told, would be sometime in June for around these parts, if I gauge correctly.

Interesting how she says you can either strain it or leave them whole. Wild, huh?

Well, more on this subject later . . .

FOR MORE INFO, LOOK AT MY POST ON PICKLED WALNUTS.

Ketchup and Vinegar

Sue buys me a subscription to Gourmet Magazine every year. I think it’s an example of how truly good she is to me, but she is always quick to remind me that her own self-interests are at play, too.

And sure, I do get a lot of great recipes and ideas from the magazine (like this keeper: Finnan Haddie Gratin), but I have to admit that the writing and feature articles almost always appeal to me as well as the photography and design. I find myself thinking about the stories and topics long after I’ve read them. I think that’s the first sign of excellence in essay writing—you keep thinking about it long after you’ve read it.

Sure, I can find good things to read all over the place, and I can find all the recipes in the world (-wide-Web) on the Internet. But Gourmet serves it all up to me each month in one sweet package. The way a great chef creates a menu that is nutritious, visually beautiful, with harmonized flavors and balanced textures, Ruth Reichl and her staff really do a wonderful job in putting together a satisfying publication.

So with that little introduction—now that you know I’m an avid Gourmet reader—I want to talk to you about ketchup, in part because Gourmet itself brought it up this month (June 2009, page 11). There’s also a Web page about it.

Now, ketchup is an Opulent Opossum topic for sure, because it’s utterly common, it’s undersung, it’s great (come on, it is—read the online article above) . . . and it’s made with vinegar.

Yes, I keep running into vinegar in my recipes—the old-timey ones, the German-heritage ones. Vinegar used to be a necessary cooking ingredient because of its preservative values as well as its ability to add what people used to call “zip.”

Zip! Remember that term? If you’re old enough, you can remember the days in the Midwest before Taco Bell came to town and people started using chili peppers to add pizzazz to their foods. We used to add vinegar and pickles to things to give them a culinary thrill. Ketchup is a member of that tribe—one member that has endured, along with cucumber pickles of various types. (Look at your fast-food hamburger.)

I mean, think about it: the same company makes America’s number-one ketchup as well as the most popular vinegars. When I go to buy ketchup or my apple cider vinegar, I always get Heinz. Chances are, you do, too.

Ketchups were a way of preserving the bounty of the summer garden during the drab winter months. We still laugh at Ronald Reagan’s declaring ketchup a “vegetable,” but when you think about it, despite the added sugars in processed ketchups, at heart ketchup is cooked, strained, pickled, canned tomatoes—the richness of a summer garden preserved in glass bottles. Can’t blame ol’ Reagan for thinking in nineteenth-century terms, as he was such a relic himself. (Sorry, I couldn’t stand him. His head-in-the-sand AIDS policy was the kicker for me. But I digress.)

Sue made an interesting observation once: French fries are good by themselves, but once you’ve started dipping them in ketchup, you can’t go back to eating them just plain. You have to keep dipping them in ketchup until they’re gone.

So it was with interest that I read Adam Brent Houghtaling’s Web post on the Gourmet site, introduced in the magazine thus: “Could the future of ketchup be in its past? Our archives are filled with apple, grape, and mushroom versions. Get the recipes and find out how the country’s best chefs are using this ubiquitous sauce at gourmet.com/go/ketchup.”

What I find most intriguing is how one type of ketchup—tomato; Heinz—has come to be ubiquitous, while there were so many different types of ketchup adding zip to the nation’s dishes in the 1800s: Grape ketchup? Mushroom ketchup? . . . Walnut ketchup? How fascinating.

I’ll stop for now with this post, but I encourage you to look at Houghtaling’s essay and reflect a bit on how our forebears in the kitchen relied on vinegar as a necessary cooking item (and not just for salad dressings), and how their families grooved on the zippiness of so many pickled and ketchupped concoctions.