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Mango Chutney
Peel, core, and quarter six pounds of sour apples, and boil them in nearly two pints of vinegar; pound eight ounces of onions, about ten or twelve ounces of ginger, and four ounces of garlic together; add these to the apples and vinegar, with twelve ounces each of sugar (which should be first dissolved), stoned raisins, and mustard-seed; this last should be washed in vinegar, and dried in the sun, before being added. Mix well in a large bowl, and put in, while mixing, another pint of vinegar, and four ounces of dried chillies. Bottle at once closely and tie bladder over the cork. Probable cost, 3s. 6d. for this quantity.
An Anglo-Indian style chutney that contains no mango at all — sour apples stand in for unripe fruit. The method is sound, but the quantities and the sealing instructions need translating.
- What the name means here"Mango chutney" in Victorian British cookery describes the style, not the fruit. Green mangoes were unobtainable, so hard sour apples were used as the acid, astringent base.
- Sour applesUse a firm cooking apple that collapses to a purée — Bramley, or Granny Smith if that is what is available. The recipe reads as six pounds weighed before peeling and coring, which will yield rather less prepared fruit.
- The gingerTen to twelve ounces is enormous by modern taste and may well mean dried root ginger, pounded in a mortar, rather than fresh rhizome. If you use fresh, expect a chutney dominated by it; halving is reasonable.
- The chilliesFour ounces of dried chillies is about 115 g of whole pods, which will produce a genuinely fierce preserve. Scale to the heat of what you have.
- Washing and drying the mustard seedRinsing in vinegar and drying is specified but not explained in the recipe. A low oven or a warm windowsill can stand in for the sun.
- The panTwo pints of vinegar boiled with fruit will pit aluminium and strip copper. Use stainless steel or enamelled cast iron, and a wooden spoon.
- When to add the second pintThe final pint of vinegar and the chillies are stirred in during mixing in the bowl, that is, off the heat rather than during the boiling.
- Bladder over the corkThe nineteenth-century seal. Use sterilised jars with vinegar-proof plastic-coated lids; bare metal lids corrode over an acid preserve within months.
- Yield and maturingNo yield is given. The ingredients total well over ten pounds before any reduction, so expect considerably more than a few jars. Chutney bottled at once is harsh; leave it at least a month, better three, for the vinegar to settle into the fruit.
Chutney reached Britain with the East India Company trade, the word coming from Hindi chatni, a relish of fruit, spice and souring agent eaten in small quantities alongside a meal. Bottled Indian chutneys were an expensive import, and by the middle of the nineteenth century British cooks were making their own domestic versions with whatever sharp fruit the garden or market gave them — apples, gooseberries, green tomatoes, rhubarb. Cassell's includes this among its preserving instructions at a moment when curry powder, mango chutney and Worcestershire-style sauces had become fixtures of the middle-class English table, several generations removed from anything served in India. The entry gives a costing of 3s. 6d. for the whole quantity, as it does throughout.