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Indian Chutney Sauce
INGREDIENTS.-8 oz. of sharp, sour apples, pared and cored; 8 oz. of tomatoes, 8 oz. of salt, 8 oz. of brown sugar, 8 oz. of stoned raisins, 4 oz. of cayenne, 4 oz. of powdered ginger. 2 oz. of garlic, 2 oz. of shalots, 3 quarts of vinegar, 1 quart of lemon-juice.
Chop the apples in small square pieces, and add to them the other ingredients.
Mix the whole well together, and put in a well-covered jar. Keep this in a warm place, and stir every day for a month, taking care to put on the lid after this operation; strain, but do not squeeze it dry; store it away in clean jars or bottles for use, and the liquor will serve as an excellent sauce for meat or fish.
SEASONABLE. Make this sauce when tomatoes are in full season, that is, from the beginning of September to the end October. of
This is a steeped, uncooked preserve: the month of daily stirring in a warm place is the whole method, and the finished product is the strained liquor rather than the solids. Read the quantities carefully before scaling.
- Cayenne4 oz of cayenne is well over a cup of ground chilli against 1 lb 8 oz of fruit, a heat level far beyond most modern palates. Anyone making a batch to actually eat should cut it drastically and treat the original figure as a period record.
- Salt8 oz is half a pound, and it is doing preservative work alongside the vinegar, not just seasoning. It is not optional in a recipe that never sees heat.
- Vinegar and lemon juice3 quarts of vinegar plus 1 quart of lemon juice is a gallon of acid liquid, and this is what keeps the jar safe through a month in a warm place. Use vinegar of at least 5 per cent acidity; the recipe gives no strength, so check the label on whatever you use.
- ShalotsShallots. Two ounces is about three or four small ones, peeled and finely chopped.
- Stoned raisinsRaisins with the seeds removed. Modern seedless raisins need no preparation, though chopping them helps them give up their sugar into the liquor.
- A warm placeThe recipe does not define this. A kitchen shelf or airing cupboard is the likely sense, rather than an oven or a hot windowsill, where evaporation and off-flavours set in.
- The vesselUse glass or glazed stoneware with a well-fitting lid. A gallon of vinegar and lemon juice will attack bare metal, and any reactive pan or lid will taint the sauce and pit itself.
- StrainingThe instruction not to squeeze the pulp dry is deliberate: pressing forces through fine sediment that clouds the bottled sauce and later drops out as a sludge. Let it drip.
- Yield and keepingExpect somewhat less strained sauce than the gallon of liquid you started with. Bottle it in sterilised glass; it should keep for months in a cool dark cupboard.
Chutney takes its name from the Hindi chatni, a fresh relish of fruit, herbs and spice pounded to eat alongside a meal; the Anglo-Indian version that came back to Britain was something rather different, a sweet-sour-hot preserve built to survive a sea voyage and a British larder. By Mrs Beeton's day bottled chutneys were a fixture of the middle-class table. What is distinctive here is that the recipe treats the solids as a means to an end: everything is steeped for a month and then strained, producing a thin spiced liquor closer to a bottled table sauce than to the chunky preserves sold under the chutney name. The seasonal note is the practical part crop in an English garden, and the whole batch was timed to that narrow window.