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Sauce, Mango Chetney, Bengal Recipe for Making
3/4 lb. of salt. 1/4 lb. of garlic. 1/4 lb. of onions. 3/4 lb. of powdered ginger. 3/4 lb. of stoned raisins. INGREDIENTS.-1½ lb. of moist sugar, lb. of salt, lb. of garlic, lb. of onions, lb. of powdered ginger, 1/4 lb. of dried chilies, 3/4 lb. of mustard seed, lb. of stoned raisins, 2 bottles of best vinegar, 30 large unripe sour apples. AVERAGE COST, 58. AVERAGE COST, 5s.
The sugar must be made into syrup; the garlic, onions and ginger be finely pounded in a mortar; the mustard-seed be washed in cold vinegar, and dried in the sun; the apples be peeled, cored and sliced, and boiled in a bottle and a half of the vinegar.
When all this is done, and the apples are quite cold, put them into a large pan, and gradually mix the whole of the rest of the ingredients, including the remaining halfbottle of vinegar. It must be well stirred until the whole is thoroughly blended, and then put into bottles for use. Tie a piece of wet bladder over the mouths of the bottles, after they are well corked. This chetney is very superior to any which can be bought, and one trial will prove it to be delicious.
Note. This recipe was given by a native to an English lady, who had long been a resident in India, and who, since her return to her native country, has become quite celebrated among her friends for the excellence of this Eastern relish.
A cold-mixed Anglo-Indian chutney of the old school: only the apples are cooked, and the keeping power comes from vinegar, salt and sugar rather than from heat processing. It is made in bulk and needs months, not days.
- The missing fractionsThe ingredient list here has lost most of its fractions in printing, so several weights are genuinely unreadable as given. Other printings show quarter- and three-quarter-pound weights for items such as the salt, garlic, onions and ginger, but the exact figures cannot be recovered from this text, and the sugar (1 lb or 1 1/2 lb) and raisins (3/4 lb or 1 lb) differ between printings. Treat any reconstruction as a guess.
- Two bottles of vinegarIf a Victorian vinegar bottle is taken as roughly an imperial pint, that is a little over a litre in total, of which 1 1/2 bottles (around 850 ml) goes to boiling the apples. Use malt or cider vinegar at 5 per cent acidity; the acid is doing the preserving, so do not dilute it.
- Thirty sour applesLarge unripe cooking apples, Bramley or similar, come to something like 10-12 lb whole. Peeled, cored and sliced you are left with perhaps 8 lb of fruit, which is why the recipe calls for a large pan.
- Moist sugarUnrefined soft brown sugar, close to today's light muscovado. Made into syrup means dissolved in a little water and brought to a boil, then cooled before it meets the cold apples.
- The mustard seedWashing the seed in cold vinegar and drying it in the sun is a cleaning step; spread the seed on a tray in a warm airy place, or in an oven at its lowest setting with the door ajar, until it is dry and rattles. Damp seed will not keep in the jar.
- Everything must be coldThe apples are specified quite cold before mixing. Warm fruit will cook the pounded garlic, onion and ginger into a dull stewed flavour, which is against the point of a raw-mixed chutney.
- Bladder and corkWet bladder tied over a corked bottle shrinks as it dries into an airtight skin. Use sterilised glass preserving jars with vinegar-proof lacquered lids instead; bare metal will corrode and taint the chutney.
- Yield and keepingThis makes a very large quantity, well over ten pounds, enough to fill a dozen or more 1-lb jars. Store in a cool dark place and give it at least two months before opening, when the raw garlic and mustard settle down; refrigerate once opened.
- The saltIf the missing figure is three-quarters of a pound, it reads as a great deal because salt is a preservative as much as a seasoning in an unheated preserve. Cutting it back gives a milder relish that should be treated as a fridge pickle and eaten within weeks.
Chetney is an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English spelling of the Hindi chatni, a fresh pounded relish, which the East India Company trade turned into something quite different on its way home: a sweet, vinegar-preserved, bottled sauce built to survive a sea voyage and an English larder. Mango is in the title but not in the pot, and that is characteristic. Unripe mangoes were the Indian original, and returning Anglo-Indian households substituted hard sour cooking apples, which behave much the same way under vinegar and sugar. Mrs Beeton's note, that the recipe passed from a native cook to an English lady long resident in India and thence to her friends at home, is the standard provenance story for this whole class of recipe, and explains why the book prints it at all: bottled Eastern relishes were a mark of a well-travelled table, and the claim that a homemade one beats anything bought was a live boast in the 1860s, when branded chutneys and sauces were arriving fast on grocers' shelves.