RECIPE: Great-Grandpa Moore's "Hot Sauce"
Easy / Vegan / Just fresh vegetables, but it's magic
This recipe originally appeared in a non-Friday edition of The Action Cookbook Newsletter on August 10, 2020.
It’s mid-August now, and I’m up to my neck in tomatoes and peppers. Ten pounds of produce are coming off the vine multiple times a week. I’m handing out produce left and right. Neighbors? I put some tomatoes in your mailbox. FedEx guy? I’ll put a pepper on the porch for that package. Census taker? There are four people and a small dog here, and also eight thousand tomatoes. Please take some on your way.
Our whole family meal planning system has been reoriented around tomatoes and peppers. Homemade pizza. Homemade pasta sauce. BLTs. I featured a tomato cocktail on here recently because I had to. I’ll take any chance I can to use these, because there’s more coming tomorrow.
It’s the cake-conveyor belt scene from I Love Lucy, but with tomatoes and peppers.
A couple days ago, I sent a picture of my daily bounty to my parents, and my father suggested that I should make ‘hot sauce’. That name is a bit misleading, and I should explain. While I am indeed making a variety of hot sauces in jars currently scattered all around the kitchen, what my Dad was referring to is a family recipe for a cold tomato-and-pepper stew, a chunky version of gazpacho that members of my family have been making for over a century. I had forgotten about it, but I said yes, absolutely—please send me that recipe. He emailed me the next morning:
The back story (which you have probably heard before) is as follows: My grandpa, C. E. Moore (your great-grandpa) always made his "hot sauce" (really a variation of today's Gazpacho) in August and September when he had tomatoes and peppers from his garden. He always used a mix of regular and hot peppers and liked to let it sit for 24-48 hours so the hot peppers could "work their magic". He fed me my 1st hot sauce in 1951 when I was just 13-14 months old - much to the chagrin and horror of my mother and grandmother. I've been eating it ever since. Grandpa Moore never had a written recipe and my mother was the only one of his four kids who ever learned how to make it. My 2 aunts and 1 uncle always wanted Mom to make hot sauce. My Mom also never had a written recipe but once, when she was making a batch, your Mom measured everything that went into the pot and came up with a written recipe for Grandpa Moore's Hot Sauce.
12 Large tomatoes – diced
4 green peppers – diced
4 red peppers – diced
1 or 2 hot peppers – diced (to taste)
½ cup olive oil
½ cup vinegar
1 teaspoon oregano
1 teaspoon garlic powder
Mix all ingredients in large bowl. Add Tabasco sauce to desired level of HOT. It gets hotter the longer it sits in the fridge and is usually best 1-2 days after preparation.
It was tailor-made for using my current seasonal bounty, so I set to making a batch Saturday morning, dicing up the tomatoes, bell peppers, and herbs, and soaking it in oil and vinegar. (I kept the hot peppers and sauce on the side for later addition, as I’m the only person in this house with any tolerance for heat.) It made a huge batch, filling a 9x13” glass dish to the brim. Dutifully following the recipe, I put it in the fridge and waited a full day to try it.
Sunday afternoon, after toiling through mowing the lawn, I sat down with a bowl of it at the picnic table. In one bite, I was sitting back at my Grandma and Grandpa Hines’s backyard in Connellsville, Pennsylvania 35 years ago. I texted Dad a picture, and he replied:
“That looks a lot like Grandpa Moore’s version. I’ve been eating some variant of this for 69 years.”
—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)