Hot Pepper Sauce: A Ghost Recipe
All cooks save recipes. It can be a peculiar pastime. For every two dozen recipes stuffed into a folder or box or computerized whatnot, one might slide into regular rotation. And that recipe often ends up so altered over time–the onions becoming scallions, the tomato sauce morphing into paste, the sugar vanishing entirely–that returning to the original recipe comes as a shock.
Try leafing through your collection sometime. It’s like going through your closets, or revisiting a stack of old journals (okay, maybe not that bad). So many saved recipes are like impulse clothing buys: rum banana torte? Goat tacos? Rabbit pate? Why so many short rib recipes? What was I thinking? Who was I going to cook this for? What person did I hope to be?
Lingering amid the curiosities, the occasionally prepared, and the abandoned are the keepers you don’t make often but wish to. These are the recipe equivalents of visiting Paris: someday, you’ll return.
Admittedly, this is rather dreamy for a hot pepper recipe. But we can dream.
Why a ghost recipe? Because my notes are so passingly scant that reading them now, five years after writing down the original recipe, I am shocked by the lack of detail left by my 8/22/10 self. Thinking back, I remember the sauce’s taste–wonderfully pungent, pleasantly tingly without being killingly spicy–so good I was sorry not to have made more.
It took little searching to locate the original recipe: Melissa Clark’s Garlicky Red Chili Hot Sauce, which in all my html incompetence, I cannot link to. Please see the 8/25/2010 online edition of the New York Times, and all credit to Melissa Clark.
Melissa Clark’s Hot Sauce
Yield: approximately 2 cups.
2 red bell peppers
4 hot red peppers
5 garlic cloves
3/4 cup distilled white vinegar
1/2 teaspoon salt
Rough chop peppers. Seed bell peppers. Seeding hot peppers will decrease their heat; this is up to you.
Crush garlic with flat chef knife to peel.
Put all ingredients in medium saucepan. Bring to simmer. Cover. Simmer seven minutes.
Puree in blender or food processor. Store in sterilized jar or jars.
Allow to cure three days before eating. It is delicious immediately, but even better if you wait.
Keeps, refrigerated, indefinitely, but won’t last that long.
Notes: If you are sensitive to hot peppers, please use gloves. Avoid touching eyes, contact lenses, mouth, or nose after handling hot peppers. Wash hands with warm, soapy water.
Fumes from vinegar bother some people; open a window or use your oven fan while simmering.
This is wonderful stuff. If spicy isn’t your bag, use sweeter peppers. I suggest making more than one jar. Trust me: it goes amazingly fast. This time around I unwittingly used milder peppers, and the result was lovely. Deep, mellow, husky.
What should you eat this with? Hell, I’d dollop it on breakfast cereal. Eggs. Beans. Hamburgers. Chicken. Rice. Stir into sour cream and dip your chips into it. Spread it on sandwiches. If you can manage it, hoard a little for cold and flu season. When that first nasty chill arrives, spoon some into your chicken soup.
Is anything ghostly anymore? Not hot pepper recipes, that’s for sure. Ghostly instead are the reasons my notes were so passingly scant, along with whatever moved me to save so many of the recipes crammed in the three-ring spiral binders holding my clippings
