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Apple Chutney
Chutney is as much used in India as we of other countries use other sauces and has as many variations as catsup, for instance. Apples are used as the foundation for several kinds of chutney. One of the simpler preparations requires five pounds of tart apples. These must be peeled, cored, and cooked smooth with two pounds of brown sugar and two quarts of cider vinegar. When thick as is catsup before diluting, place in a crock and add two pounds of chopped raisins, a small minced onion, one ounce each of white and black mustard seed (ground) and two of ground ginger, one tablespoon of salt, and two or three pods of red peppers minced. Mix and let stand over night (about ten hours), then stir again without cooking and place in small jars, sealing well. This will keep for years. ト
A straightforward Anglo-Indian style chutney: apples cooked down to a thick paste with vinegar and sugar, then loaded with spice, raisins and chilli off the heat. The spice measurements are by weight and they are much larger than a modern recipe would print.
- The hinge: the spices are never cookedEverything after the apple base — raisins, onion, mustard, ginger, salt, chilli — goes in cold and is only stirred. That is deliberate; the mustard and ginger keep their bite instead of turning flat and dusty. Resist the urge to simmer the finished mixture.
- Spice by the ounceOne ounce of ground mustard seed is roughly 4 tablespoons; two ounces of ground ginger is close to 3/4 cup. That is a fierce amount of ginger for 5 lb of apples, and the result is a hot, medicinal chutney by current tastes. Halving both is reasonable if you want something closer to a modern jar.
- Vinegar and panTwo quarts of cider vinegar to 5 lb apples reduces to a very sharp, catsup-thick paste, and takes 1 1/2 to 2 hours over low heat with regular stirring. Use stainless or enamelled cast iron; bare iron, aluminium or copper will react with the acid and taint the colour and flavour.
- SealingCold-packing an unheated mixture into jars and calling it sealed is not current practice, whatever the acidity. Either treat it as a refrigerator preserve, or pack it hot and process the jars by a current tested boiling-water method for your jar size and altitude.
- YieldA large batch, several quarts, which is why the original specifies small jars. Chutney oxidises once opened, so half-pints are the sensible size.
- "Keep for years"Properly sealed and stored cool, a chutney this acid and this sweet does keep a very long time, but it darkens steadily, and the flavour benefits from some rest before opening.
- Red pepper pods"Two or three pods of red peppers" here most likely means small dried cayenne-type chillies rather than a fresh sweet pepper. Two or three dried cayennes, minced with their seeds, give roughly the intended heat.
Chutney comes into English from Hindi chatni, a general word for a relish pounded or cooked from fruit, herbs and spice, and the bottled sweet-sour version familiar in Britain and America is an Anglo-Indian adaptation rather than an Indian dish as such — thickened, heavily vinegared and sugared, it is often said, so it would survive a sea voyage and a grocer's shelf. Mango was the prestige base, and where mangoes were unavailable or expensive, cooks reached for tart apples, which behave much the same way: high pectin, high acid, and they break down to a smooth pulp. That substitution is why a chutney recipe turns up among the apple cookery at all. The introduction's comparison to catsup is telling about the period: this was the age of the bottled table sauce, when a well-run household expected several sharp condiments in the pantry and judged them, as the author does, by how thick they cooked down.