[Sca-cooks] OT: on a tangential note -- "Chili Sauce"

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Hullo, the list!

Does anyone have any insight to offer, since we've been speculating a 
bit about various alleged chili preparations, exactly what is the 
provenance and purpose of bottled "chili sauce"? I suspect the 
non-Americans on this list may not know the substance to which I 
refer...

Someone mentioned a sauce added to "chili", and said it was like a 
thin, watered-down, sweet ketchup. Could that have been chili sauce, 
such as people like Heinz make? I've never actually tried the stuff, 
as far as I know, but occasionally note its existence on supermarket 
shelves, and am always amused by the fact that, so far from having 
chillies as a primary ingredient, it actually contains none, as a 
rule.

Apparently, though, this stuff is a traditional main ingredient in 
the red cocktail sauce you sometimes find served with cold seafoods 
in the US, although by the time the requisite lemon, Worcestershire, 
and horseradish (plus optional Tabasco) are added, the absence of 
chili in the chili sauce is less glaring.

It's interesting, though, that in a way we've sort of come full 
circle here: the special steak sauce from the Old New York (even 
better: Old Brooklyn) steak house, Peter Luger's, that great temple 
to cholesterol whose waiters have been insulting customers and 
refusing to honor checks and credit cards, other than their own Peter 
Luger's credit card, for well over a hundred years (having a Peter 
Luger credit card is a sign you have made it in New York, not that 
you can do anything else with it but buy a meal at Peter Luger's) -- 
their steak sauce, which you can now buy in bottles, is a thin, 
tomato-based (but apparently not ketchup-based) sauce that seems to 
contain crushed tomatoes, maybe molasses or some other sweetener like 
corn syrup, just a little vinegar, grated horseradish and some other, 
unnamed spices. It is sold refrigerated in glass bottles, but is used 
in the restaurant as a salad dressing, with their beefsteak tomato 
and bermuda onion appetizer (I guess this is really a salad), a steak 
sauce, and with cold seafood cocktails. In that context it's actually 
quite good stuff.

I was just wondering whether there was any connection to this 
mysterious bottled chililess chili sauce. Apart from seafood cocktail 
sauce, what is chili sauce of the Heinz variety used for? Or are you 
supposed to put it on chili?

Adamantius
-- 




"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la 
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them 
eat cake!"
	-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau, "Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
	-- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry 
Holt, 07/29/04