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Bengal Chutney
One pound of brown sugar; one-half pound of salt; two ounces of garlic and six of onions; one ounce of cayenne; fifteen sour apples; one-fourth pound of bruised ginger; one-half pound of mustard seed; three pints of vinegar. Pound the onions and garlic thoroughly in a mortar, slice the apples, boil them in the vinegar till soft, bruise or mash them with a spoon and when cold mix them with the other ingredients. Seal in widemouthed bottles.
An uncooked-style Anglo-Indian chutney: only the apples and vinegar see heat, and everything else is stirred in cold, so the vinegar, salt and sugar do the preserving. Read the seasoning quantities carefully before you commit.
- The cayenne is the hingeOne ounce is roughly four to five tablespoons of ground cayenne for about four pounds of fruit — punishing by modern palates. Start with a tablespoon or two, taste after the mixture has stood a day, and add more if you want it.
- Weights in cupsA pound of brown sugar is about 2 1/4 cups packed; half a pound of mustard seed is roughly 1 1/4 cups. Half a pound of salt is about 3/4 cup if fine-grained, but coarse kosher salt will measure considerably more by volume, so weigh it. Use plain pickling or kosher salt rather than iodised table salt, whose additives can cloud the mixture.
- Fifteen sour applesFigure about 4 to 5 lb of firm tart apples — Granny Smith, Bramley, or any hard windfall. Peel and core them; the original appears to assume cooking apples that break down readily in the vinegar.
- Bruised gingerIn this period that usually means dried whole ginger root cracked in a mortar. Fresh root ginger, coarsely grated or crushed, gives a brighter result; either way 1/4 lb is a substantial 4 oz.
- Mustard seed stays wholeWhole seed stirred into a cold mixture will not soften for days. Soak it in a cup of the vinegar overnight before mixing, or crack part of it, so the chutney does not eat gritty for the first fortnight.
- Mortar workTwo ounces of garlic (a dozen or more cloves, depending on size) and six ounces of onions can go into a food processor to a coarse paste. Do not liquefy them; the texture matters.
- VesselsBoil the apples and vinegar in stainless steel or enamel — aluminium, copper and cast iron react with vinegar and will taint the batch and discolour it.
- Storage"Seal in widemouthed bottles" tells us nothing about the closure, and the preserve relies on acid, salt and sugar alone. Fill clean jars, keep them refrigerated, and treat it as a fridge preserve rather than a shelf-stable one unless you follow a current water-bath canning procedure for chutney.
- Yield and ageingExpect something on the order of 3 to 4 quarts. The flavour is raw and harsh at first; a month in the cold lets the mustard, ginger and vinegar settle into each other.
Chutney reached British and American cookbooks through the East India trade, the word coming from Hindi chatni, and the imported bottled sort was familiar to English-speaking cooks. Recipes titled "Bengal chutney" in English-language books of the 1880s and 1890s often run to this kind of thing: an approximation built on tart cooking apples in place of green mango, heavy on vinegar, salt and mustard seed so it would keep in a cellar. It belongs with the sauces by use, as a relish beside cold meat and curry rather than as a preserve in its own right, and its presence in a general American household manual shows how far the taste for Indian condiments had travelled from the households that first served them.