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Chutney
4 cups sliced sour apples 2 onions chopped 4 cups brown sugar 1 quart vinegar 1 inch ginger root 1 teaspoon cayenne 4 cups chopped raisins 1 shallot chopped 1/4 cup salt Mix all ingredients and cook gently all day. Cool; then boil hard five minutes, stirring constantly. sterilized jars and seal.
A standard Anglo-Indian apple chutney, written with the terseness of a cook who assumed you had made one before. The published text is also missing a word or two at the end: the sense is to pour the boiling chutney into sterilized jars and seal.
- Cook it low, not all day"Cook gently all day" belongs to a coal range that held a bare simmer without attention. On a modern burner, two to three hours at the lowest setting that keeps bubbles breaking is enough to soften the fruit and thicken the syrup. Judge by texture, not the clock: it is done when a spoon drawn across the bottom leaves a channel that fills in slowly.
- Use a non-reactive potA quart of vinegar simmering for hours will pit bare aluminum and strip cast iron, and both will throw a metallic taste into the finished chutney. Stainless steel or enameled cast iron only.
- Sour applesThis means firm green cooking apples, not dessert varieties. Granny Smith is the closest supermarket equivalent; roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb before peeling and coring should give 4 cups sliced.
- The gingerA 1-inch piece of fresh ginger root, peeled and bruised or sliced thin. Left in whole pieces it perfumes the pot and can be fished out; grated, it disappears into the body of the chutney. Do not substitute ground ginger measure for measure.
- The saltA quarter cup is a great deal by modern taste, and the recipe does not say what kind of salt is meant; it may well be a coarse-grained one. If you are using fine table salt, which packs denser by volume, start with half the amount and correct at the end; the chutney is also a preserve, so salt is doing work beyond seasoning.
- Raisins and shallotFour cups of raisins chopped by hand is a long job; pulse them in a food processor with a spoonful of the sugar to keep them from balling up. The shallot is in addition to the two onions, for a sharper aromatic note.
- The final hard boilThe five-minute rolling boil is there to bring the whole batch above filling temperature and to drive off the last water. Stir constantly, since a sugar-heavy chutney scorches on the bottom in seconds at that heat.
- SealingCurrent practice for vinegar preserves is to fill clean hot jars, leaving 1/2 inch of headspace, and process them in a boiling-water bath rather than relying on the heat of the chutney alone. Anything that does not seal goes in the refrigerator.
- Yield and keepingRoughly 4 to 5 pints. The flavor is raw and vinegar-forward at first; chutney of this type wants a month or two in the jar before the heat, sugar and spice settle together.
Chutney takes its name from the Hindi chatni, a fresh relish pounded to order, but the thing preserved in jars and sold in Victorian and Edwardian groceries was an export product — sweet, dark, vinegar-based, built to survive a sea voyage from Calcutta to London. Cooks in Britain and America who liked the bottled kind and could not readily buy green mangoes reached for the fruit they had, and the tart cooking apple became the standard domestic substitute; apple chutney recipes of this shape appear across turn-of-the-century American household books. Its presence in a Lowney's book — published by a Boston chocolate manufacturer, whose cookbooks ranged well past confectionery into general household cookery — reflects how thoroughly Anglo-Indian condiments had been absorbed into the American preserving closet by the 1900s, filed alongside the piccalilli and the spiced pears as something to serve with cold meat.