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Indian Chutney
Chutney of excellent quality may be bought so cheaply that it is hardly worth while to make it at home; but for the benefit of those who prefer to make their own we give the following recipe. Boil together a pint of good vinegar with half a pound of sour, unripe apples, peeled, cored, and quartered. When pulped and cool, add, first pounding them separately in a mortar and afterwards together, the following ingredients:--Four ounces of stoned raisins, eight ounces of brown sugar, two ounces of garlic, and two ounces of mustard-seed: mix these well with two ounces of powdered ginger, the same of salt, and one ounce of cayenne. Put the mixture into an earthenware jar, and set the jar in a warm corner by the fire until next morning, when the chutney may be put into small jars and tied down. It will keep good a year or two. Time to stew apples, until soft. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
A blunt, hot, Anglo-Indian style chutney with no fresh spice and no long simmer — the apples do the cooking and the rest is pounded raw and left to mellow. Two things decide whether it works: the strength of the vinegar and how finely everything is pounded.
- Vinegar strength"Good vinegar" here would most likely have been malt vinegar, though the book gives no strength; modern supermarket malt and cider vinegars run to about 5 per cent acidity. Do not substitute a mild seasoned or diluted rice vinegar; the acidity is what preserves the jar for the promised year or two.
- The applesSour, unripe cooking apples — a Bramley or any hard green windfall. Dessert apples are sweeter and lower in acid. Half a pound, peeled and cored, is about two to three medium apples.
- Scale of the spicingAn ounce of cayenne is roughly four to five tablespoons in a batch of about two pounds, and two ounces of ground ginger is a small jarful. This is a chutney meant to be spread thinly beside cold meat and curry, not eaten by the spoon. Halving the cayenne gives something closer to modern shop chutney without affecting keeping quality.
- Garlic and mustard seedTwo ounces of garlic is roughly a large head, peeled. The mortar work matters — whole mustard seed pounded coarse gives the characteristic grit and heat; pre-ground mustard powder gives a flatter, duller result. A food processor does the job, but pulse rather than purée.
- "A warm corner by the fire"An overnight rest somewhere gently warm, which starts the salt and vinegar drawing on the garlic and mustard; the book gives no temperature. A turned-off oven with the light on, or the top of a fridge, is the modern equivalent. It is a maturing step, not a cooking or sterilising one.
- Jars and lids"Tied down" means a paper or bladder cover tied over the rim. Use clean, hot, dry jars with vinegar-proof lids — plastic-lined or glass. Bare metal lids will corrode over a chutney this acidic and taint the top layer.
- Keeping and maturingThe high vinegar, sugar and salt make this a genuinely long-keeping preserve, but it is raw-packed rather than heat-processed, so store it cool and dark and refrigerate after opening. It is harsh for the first month; three months in the jar rounds the garlic and mustard considerably.
- YieldBetween two and three pounds, or four to six small jars. The "probable cost, 1s. 6d." is a shilling and sixpence for the whole batch; the opening sentence implies a bought jar cost little more, though the book gives no comparison price.
Chutney comes from the Hindi chatni, a fresh relish pounded to order and eaten the same day; what returned to Britain with the East India Company was something quite different — a cooked, heavily vinegared, sweet-sour preserve built to survive the voyage home and then the pantry. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the 1870s and after, bottled chutney was a fully industrial product, which is why the entry opens by more or less advising the reader not to bother: Crosse & Blackwell and their competitors were selling it cheaply enough that home production had become an eccentricity. The recipe itself is a fair snapshot of the Anglo-Indian formula that survives today in "Major Grey" style chutneys — apple standing in for mango, raisins for sweetness and body, and a ferocious load of ginger, garlic and cayenne standing in for the fresh aromatics no British kitchen could get. The instruction to pound each ingredient separately and then together is the older, pre-mincer method, and it does produce a different texture from a machine: uneven, with distinct fragments of raisin and mustard seed rather than a uniform paste.