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Chutney
3/4 pint (1½ cups) vinegar I heaping tablespoonful (I oz.) salt 1 tablespoonful red pepper 1 tablespoonful powdered cinnamon 1 tablespoonful powdered cloves 2 tablespoonfuls chopped garlic Wash the peaches and apricots, cover them with cold water, and soak for twelve hours; put them into an earthenware dish, add the dates, seeded and cut into small pieces, add one cupful of cold water, and stew till they are soft. Add all the other ingredients and simmer for twenty minutes, stirring frequently. 18 ears corn 2 lbs. sugar I firm cabbage 5 large sliced onions 3 red peppers
The text as printed is a casualty of the compositor: the fruit quantities that should head the ingredient list are missing, and the last five lines (corn, sugar, cabbage, onions, red peppers) belong to the corn relish recipe that followed. Read the method, not the list.
- What is actually missingThe instructions call for peaches, apricots and dates, but no weights survive for any of them. Dried peaches and apricots are meant — nothing else needs a twelve-hour soak — and a workable ratio is about 1/2 lb each of dried peaches and apricots to 1/2 lb dates for the spice and vinegar quantities given. Treat that as a reconstruction, not the original.
- The stray corn relishIgnore the 18 ears of corn, 2 lbs sugar, cabbage, onions and red peppers. Those are the opening ingredients of a separate pickle and have nothing to do with this chutney.
- Red pepperA full tablespoon of ground cayenne in this volume of chutney is fierce by current taste. Start with a teaspoon, add more at the end of the simmer once you can taste the finished balance.
- Earthenware over heatThe "earthenware dish" is a stewing vessel, not a baking dish, and a period one would go over a low flame or into a water bath. Use a heavy stainless or enamelled pan; do not use bare aluminium or cast iron, which react with the vinegar and turn the fruit grey and metallic.
- Twenty minutes is shortTwenty minutes gets the spices infused but leaves the chutney loose. Simmer until a spoon drawn across the bottom leaves a channel that fills slowly — usually 35 to 45 minutes — and stir often, since the sugars in the dates scorch readily.
- No sugar of its ownAll the sweetness comes from the dried fruit, so this is a sharp, savoury chutney rather than a jammy one. If it tastes raw and acid at the end, a few tablespoons of brown sugar stirred in during the last five minutes rounds it without changing its character.
- Yield and keepingThe yield cannot be fixed from the text, since the fruit weights are missing; on the reconstruction above expect a few cups. The recipe gives no sealing or processing instructions, so treat it as a refrigerator chutney: cool, jar, and use within a month. For shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested water-bath procedure.
Chutney reached English and American cookbooks through the Anglo-Indian household, where the Hindi chatni — a fresh relish, often pounded rather than cooked — was reworked into a boiled, vinegar-preserved sweet-sour condiment that could survive a sea voyage and a pantry shelf. By the turn of the twentieth century the form was thoroughly domesticated: dried fruit, vinegar, salt, cayenne, garlic and warm spices, simmered down and jarred, with whatever the cook could get standing in for the mango of the Indian original. Peaches, apricots and dates, all reliably available dried in an American grocery of the period, made a chutney possible in February. Its appearance in a casserole-cookery book is less odd than it looks — the earthenware stewing pot was exactly the vessel a careful cook wanted for long acid simmering, before enamelled steel made the point moot.