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Tomato Chutney
Pick and wipe on a cloth five pounds of ripe tomatoes, put them in an earthenware jar with one breakfast cupful of salt and one-half pint of vinegar, cover the jar to keep out the air, place it in a saucepan of boiling water and allow it to remain for six hours. Turn the contents of the jar out onto a sieve and pass it through taking care not to have any of the seeds or skin. Put two ounces each of shredded garlic and red peppers into a saucepan, add two ounces of ginger also cut up small and two pounds of sugar made into a syrup with one quart of vinegar; add the tomatoes and bring the whole gently to the boil. Remove the pan, let the chutney cool, put it into bottles, cork them down and stand them in a warm place until wanted.
A late-Victorian Anglo-Indian chutney of the kind hotel kitchens kept on hand for curries and cold meat. The cooking is sound enough; the preserving instruction at the end is not, and the recipe cannot be followed to the letter today.
- Why the ending failsBottles merely corked and then stood "in a warm place until wanted" is open-air storage. A cork is not a seal, the contents are never brought to a processing temperature in the container, and warmth is exactly what encourages the yeasts and moulds that survive the brief boil. Use a current tested preserving recipe if you want shelf-stable chutney.
- No measured processThere is no jar sterilisation, no headspace, no boiling-water processing time and no finished pH given. Chutney of this composition is usually strongly acidic, but nothing here confirms it, and the recipe gives the cook no way to check.
- The six-hour jarAn earthenware jar of salted tomatoes set in a saucepan of boiling water is a bain-marie: it holds the fruit below boiling for hours so it collapses without scorching. Six hours of steady boiling water also means six hours of topping the pan up.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces. A full cup of salt to five pounds of tomatoes is an extreme figure even for a Victorian preserve, and none of it is drained off — the pulp goes through the sieve salt and all.
- Red peppers"Two ounces of red peppers" is genuinely ambiguous. Two ounces of dried hot chillies and two ounces of fresh sweet red pepper are different dishes entirely; period Anglo-Indian usage usually meant the hot kind, which at that weight would be fierce.
- Passing the pulpPressing five pounds of cooked tomato through a sieve, keeping back every seed and shred of skin, is the slow part of the work. A food mill with a fine plate does the same job, and the recipe's insistence on no seeds and no skin is what gives the finished chutney its smooth texture.
- YieldFive pounds of tomatoes reduced to pulp, plus two pounds of sugar and two and a half pints of vinegar in total, gives a large batch — on the order of six to eight pints before any long reduction.
Chutney reached English and American tables through the Anglo-Indian household, the word coming from Hindi chatni, a relish of fruit or vegetables pounded with salt, chilli and spice. What British cooks made of it was sweeter, more vinegary and far more shelf-stable than most Indian originals — a bottled sauce for cold beef and curry rather than something ground fresh for a single meal. That is plainly what this is: garlic, ginger, chilli, sugar and vinegar in quantities meant to keep. Its presence in Oscar Tschirky's book puts it among the European and imperial condiments a grand hotel kitchen turned out in house.