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Apple Chutney
Peel and core twenty-five large green apples, and slice them in long thin strips, throwing them into cold water as soon as cut. Take an enamelled pan and boil them in one pint and a half of vinegar, without any water, till quite soft; let them stand till quite cold, then turn them into a large basin, and cover them with one pound of salt, crushed fine, one pound of aisins, picked and stoned, half a pound of white mustard seed, husked, half a pound of blanched almonds, sliced, half a pound of powdered chillies, one pound of green ginger, pounded, and half a pound of garlic, pounded, in layers. Make four pounds of preserving sugar into a thick syrup by boiling with half a pint of vinegar. Pour the boiling syrup over the apples and other ingredients, and lastly add one pint of vinegar. Stir all well together with a wooden spoon: bottle, and cork when cold. Let it stand five or six weeks before using. Probable cost, 8d. per bottle.
A full-scale Anglo-Indian chutney, sized for a Victorian storeroom rather than a modern fridge. The proportions work, but two of them — the chillies and the salt — need thinking about before you commit.
- Scale and yieldTwenty-five large apples is roughly 8-10 lb of fruit, and with 4 lb of sugar, some 5 lb of other solids and 3 pints of vinegar in all the finished batch will run to well over a dozen pounds of chutney. Quartering the whole recipe gives a manageable four or five jars.
- ChilliesHalf a pound of powdered chillies against 8-10 lb of apples is fierce by any modern measure. Start at a quarter of that weight and taste; you can always add more before bottling.
- SaltA pound of salt is a preserving quantity, not a seasoning one. If you are refrigerating the finished chutney rather than keeping it in a cool larder for a year, half that is plenty.
- An enamelled panThe instruction is about chemistry, not equipment snobbery: vinegar attacks bare iron, copper and aluminium and will turn the chutney grey and metallic. Use enamelled cast iron or stainless steel, and a wooden or plastic spoon as directed.
- "Aisins"A printer's slip for raisins. "Picked and stoned" means removing stalks and seeds — modern seedless raisins need neither.
- Green gingerFresh ginger root, as opposed to the dried and ground kind. A pound of it, peeled and pounded to a paste, is what the recipe wants; a food processor does in seconds what a mortar did in twenty minutes.
- White mustard seed, huskedYellow mustard seed with the outer coat rubbed off. Whole yellow mustard seed is a perfectly good substitute and gives a little more texture.
- Preserving sugarCoarse-crystal sugar sold for jam-making because it dissolves cleanly and throws less scum. Ordinary granulated sugar works; skim the syrup as it boils.
- Bottling"Bottle, and cork when cold" is Victorian practice. Ladle into hot sterilised jars with vinegar-proof lids instead — plain metal lids corrode — and refrigerate after opening. The five or six weeks' standing is not optional: the raw vinegar needs it to mellow.
Chutney reached British kitchens from India, the word coming from Hindi chatnī, and by the time Cassell's dictionary was compiled it had become a fixture of the English store cupboard rather than an exotic import. Apples stand in here for the mangoes of the original — a substitution often found in British recipes, since hard green cooking apples collapse to the same soft, sharp pulp and were available by the bushel every autumn. The ingredient list, with its garlic, fresh ginger, husked mustard seed and blanched almonds, shows how completely the Anglo-Indian version had settled into domestic practice: nothing in it is treated as unusual or in need of explanation. The costing at eightpence a bottle is the giveaway that this was aimed at a household making its own condiments in quantity rather than buying them ready-made by the jar.