Mothers and daughters are closest when daughters become mothers.
~Author Unknown

First, I must prepare. At the farmer’s market, I select what seem to me the best tomatoes — red and plump and promising. Next, I look over the peppers, choosing eight sweet red ones and a dozen hot red ones. Their shiny skins feel smooth to the touch. Finally, I buy onions, their flavor wrapped loosely in thin brown skin. Eight of them will join the tomatoes and peppers, vinegar, and seasonings as ingredients in my chili sauce.

Before we moved to our smaller, urban property, I grew what I needed myself. It felt right then, standing in my garden, pushing aside foliage and finding the perfect vegetables for this project. Now I buy from farmers who picked their crops hours before.

I remember my mother strolling among the selections at the market and choosing carefully. Like her, I continue to seek the best.

I keep her recipe in a special place. When I take it out, it feels like I greet an old friend. It has been a kind of companion all my life.

At home, I remove the huge silver-colored canner from its basement shelf. Next, I assemble pint jars. Some still wear their gleaming metal bands that will hold the lids. Although I packed them away carefully, I scrub them to ensure their cleanliness.

During more than forty years of marriage, I have assembled countless boxes of jars and lids as I canned our garden’s vegetables and fruit. Most important, I have that family recipe, given to me to continue the tradition. I must carry out this duty.

The chili sauce I make connects me, with love, to Mother and to others in my family, long gone. I hear them ask my mother, “Where is your chili sauce? I’d prefer that on my hamburger.” My father smothered his breakfast eggs with it.

Whenever I prepare to follow the recipe, I remember helping Mother. She did not actually need my assistance, but she must have realized I needed the practice to make the sauce myself some day.

I begin as she did, soaking the tomatoes in hot water to make their skins come off easier. As the red orbs bob in the sink, I hear Mother say, “Go out to the garden and find one more good-sized tomato.”

She was always well prepared. The day before she planned to cook her chili sauce, she peeled the tomatoes. That day, the one prior to the actual canning, my father and I anticipated the flavorful result of Mother’s efforts. It seems as if it were just yesterday that my mother’s inviting chili sauce aroma filled every room of the house, tantalizing and teasing.

When I prepare the onions and the peppers, I grind them in my cast-iron grinder. As I grab the wooden handle and crank it, I see my mother turning into a white-haired woman who continued making chili sauce until the year before she died. Working this way puts me in touch with she who went before me.

Just after I started my chili sauce cooking this day, my youngest child called from her California home. “I am making chili sauce,” I told her.

“Oh, wow. I wish I could smell it,” she said and reminisced about coming home from school as a young child and smelling the chili sauce from the sidewalk on the corner. “The house smelled so wonderful for a few days,” she said. I remembered that was true all during my childhood as well.

Today is not simply the day I fill waiting jars with the taste of summer we will savor all year long; it is the stirring of love and warm memories. My grandmother and her mother before her canned every fall. As a child, I explored their basement food pantries lined with home-canned fruit, tomatoes, and pickles. I knew at some family dinner during the coming winter, I would taste some of those put-away treasures.

Perhaps, my mother’s recipe came from one of them. I do not know. Someone perfected that recipe and gave it to the next in line. And we continue to follow it, handing it down in an endless circle of labor and care for our families just as the earth continues to yield its bounty.

I imagine my own daughters may someday follow the same directions I do. My older daughter inherited her grandmother’s dark blue canning pan. Perhaps, someday a daughter of one of my daughters will decide to engage in the family tradition. Then, her today will merge with all those yesterdays and her family will taste the past.

And when she stirs the simmering concoction, I hope she thinks of me with love.

Chili Sauce

• 30 ripe tomatoes
• 8 medium onions
• 6 green sweet peppers (Mother preferred a rich red color so she used all red sweet peppers)
• 12 red hot peppers
• 1 quart cider vinegar
• 3 tablespoons salt
• 4 cups sugar
• 1 teaspoon allspice
• 1 teaspoon ginger
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon

Scald tomatoes in boiling water to loosen skins. Peel and cut into quarters.

Chop fine or coarsely grind onions. Put vinegar and onions in large non-aluminum pan with tomatoes. Bring to a boil, then simmer, uncovered, for 20 minutes.

Seed and chop fine (or coarsely grind) peppers. Add peppers and all other ingredients to pan. Simmer until it is a little thicker than ketchup, four hours or more.

Clean jars thoroughly. (Recipe yields from 6 to 10 pints.) Put jars and lids in hot water. Carefully drain and then fill hot jars with warm chili sauce. (If jars aren’t heated enough from the hot water, they will break.) Clean off any drips from jar rim. Place warm lid on jar top and screw on ring to hold lid in place.

Place warm jars in rack in canning pan. Lower jars into water so they are completely covered. Bring to a boil. Boil for 25 minutes. Lift rack. Refrigerate any jars that do not seal.

Use the sauce on fried eggs, hamburgers, hot dogs and sausages. Mix with soy sauce for a marinade for fish or with mayonnaise for salad dressing. Use in any recipes calling for a sweet or spicy sauce. I like to add it to a white sauce to use in a casserole with noodles and clam.

— Sandy McPherson Carrubba —