What to Do With Fifteen Big Tomatoes: No-Heat Chili

Golden brown zucchini cake with a generous dollop of chili sauce on it.

That’s a dollop of this chili sauce on the zucchini cake.

Now, at last, I have enough tomatoes to can them, and make sauce, and produce a favorite condiment, Chili Sauce, which isn’t anything like what you think it will be. I could’ve sworn I put the recipe for it in this column already, but can’t find any trace of it in my record, so since I made two batches of it this week in order to help work through goodness-knows-how-many pounds of tomatoes I picked, I thought I’d share the recipe with you.

I found this recipe in a manuscript collection from circa 1885 or so. The seasonings are what you’d expect for a spice cake instead of something with the name chili: cinnamon, allspice, and cloves. No capsicums in sight. Sugar, vinegar, mustard seeds, a pile of tomatoes, plus onions and peppers, cooked for hours, making the house smell perfectly wonderful. I love this stuff on fishcakes, corn oysters, zucchini fritters, even hot dogs. It is one of my all-time favorite historic recipes, a real Golden Oldie.

Don’t fret about the quantities. Just select fifteen big tomatoes or their equivalent. I sometimes take five of my biggest and line them up on the table. Then I line up more tomatoes to match the length and relative size of the big ones, which means sometimes I have two standing in for one. You need six onions–any old medium ones–and five green bell peppers. If you like the heat of jalapenos, or hot Hungarian peppers, well, be my guest. Add to taste, or sprinkle in some red pepper flakes.

The chili vegetables all chopped and ready for cooking.

The chili vegetables all chopped and ready for cooking.

The only tedious thing about this recipe is how long it takes to make it. I even reduced the original recipe by one cup of vinegar in order to cut down on the overall liquid to boil away. I usually plan to make this when I am in the kitchen anyway, canning tomatoes or making pickles, so that it can cook while I am on hand to stir to prevent sticking. I haven’t tried it yet, but I suppose pouring it into a roasting pan, and putting it into an oven might be a lower labor-intensive way of cooking it down. If you did that, I bet you could ignore it for an hour between stirs.

A steaming preserve-pan full of chili sauce.

A steaming preserve-pan full of chili sauce.

As a test for thickness, I put a spoonful on a small plate, and tip it to see if liquid seeps out. When only a little appears on the edge of the sauce, it is ready to can.

Observe a minimal amount of clear liquid on the perimeter of this spoonful of chili sauce, a sign that it is done.

Observe a minimal amount of clear liquid on the perimeter of this spoonful of chili sauce, a sign that it is done.


Chili Sauce
15 large tomatoes
6 onions
5 green bell peppers
¼ cup pickling salt
2/3 cup white sugar
1 ½ teaspoons ground cloves
1 teaspoon allspice
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon mustard seeds
4 cups cider vinegar
Chop all the tomatoes, onions, and green peppers fairly coarsely. Put the vegetables plus all the rest of the ingredients into a large non-reactive pan, and cook for two to three hours, stirring often enough to prevent sticking. When thick enough that very little clear liquid seeps out, put into sterilized, pint-sized canning jars, put on a lid and ring, and process in a boiling-water bath for about ten minutes.
Makes about six pints.

Sandy Oliver

About Sandy Oliver

Sandy Oliver Sandy is a freelance food writer with the column Taste Buds appearing weekly since 2006 in the Bangor Daily News, and regular columns in Maine Boats, Homes, and Harbors magazine and The Working Waterfront. Besides freelance food writing, she is a pioneering food historian beginning her work in 1971 at Mystic Seaport Museum, where she developed a fireplace cooking program in an 1830s house. After moving to Maine in 1988, Sandy wrote, Saltwater Foodways: New Englanders and Their Foods at Sea and Ashore in the 19th Century published in 1995. She is the author of The Food of Colonial and Federal America published in fall of 2005, and Giving Thanks: Thanksgiving History and Recipes from Pilgrims to Pumpkin Pie which she co-authored with Kathleen Curtin. She often speaks to historical organizations and food professional groups around the country, organizes historical dinners, and conducts classes and workshops in food history and in sustainable gardening and cooking. Sandy lives on Islesboro, an island in Penobscot where she gardens, preserves, cooks and teaches sustainable lifeways.