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Tomato Chutney
2½ lbs. tomatoes 1 lb. apples I large onion 1 pint (2 cups) vinegar 2 tablespoonfuls salt 4 heaping tablespoonfuls (4 ozs.) brown sugar 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 ozs.) ground ginger 1 tablespoonful mustard seed Skin and slice the tomatoes into an earthenware dish, add the apples and onion finely chopped, add the vinegar and salt, and stew until soft; then rub through a sieve, stir in the sugar, ginger, mustard seed, and cook gently for half an hour.
Cover the jar and leave in a warm place for three days; then divide into wide-necked bottles, cork tightly, and store in a cool place.
A straightforward Anglo-Indian style chutney, sieved smooth rather than left chunky. The quantities are sound; the storage instructions are the part that has not aged well.
- The vesselThe "earthenware dish" is used here for stewing over heat. Any non-reactive heavy pan works; avoid bare aluminium or cast iron, which react with vinegar and can darken the chutney and give it a metallic edge.
- Ginger, by weightTwo heaping tablespoons is given as 2 oz, which is far more than 2 tablespoons of modern ground ginger weighs (closer to 1/2 oz). Go by the ounces if you want the original heat, but 2 oz of ground ginger in 3½ lb of fruit is fierce; a scant ounce gives a chutney most palates today will read as strongly spiced rather than punishing.
- Vinegar strengthIf this is an imperial pint of 20 fl oz, the parenthetical "2 cups" undercounts it slightly; the book's own weight equivalences are loose, so treat the figure as approximate. Use 5 percent acidity malt or cider vinegar; anything weaker will not preserve, and the sourness carries the whole recipe.
- ApplesCooking apples of the Bramley type were most likely meant, and they collapse into the mixture. A firm eating apple will stay in pieces and resist the sieve; if that is all you have, chop it finer and expect a longer stew.
- The sieveRubbing the softened mixture through a sieve is what makes this a smooth sauce-like chutney rather than a preserve of pieces. A food mill does the same work in a fraction of the time. Skip the step entirely if you prefer a chunky chutney; nothing else in the method depends on it.
- Cooking downHalf an hour of gentle cooking after the sugar goes in is a minimum. Stop when a spoon drawn across the base leaves a channel that does not immediately fill with liquid; under-reduced chutney weeps vinegar in the jar.
- Three days in a warm placeThis reads as a maturing step rather than a deliberate fermentation. It is not necessary, and does little that a few weeks in the jar will not do better. Chutney does genuinely improve with a month or two of age.
- StorageCorked bottles at room temperature are not adequate by current practice. Fill sterilised jars with proper vinegar-proof lids while the chutney is hot, and either process in a boiling water bath following a current tested guide or simply refrigerate and use within a couple of months.
- YieldExpect somewhere in the region of 4 to 6 cups of finished chutney, depending on how far you reduce it.
Chutney reached British kitchens from India, the word coming from Hindi chatni, a fresh relish pounded from herbs, fruit and spice and eaten the day it was made. What returned with colonial households was something quite different: a cooked, vinegared, sugar-heavy preserve built to survive a long sea voyage and an English pantry, of which the commercial bottled "Major Grey" style is the best-known descendant. Tomato chutney is the domestic end of that line, a way of using the late-summer glut of tomatoes and windfall apples together. The heavy hand with ground ginger and mustard seed, and the absence of the chillies a modern cook would reach for, is characteristic of British spicing of the period.