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Chutney
Chutney is an English or East Indian relish, much esteemed for bon vivants. It is an expensive thing to buy, but can be made at home at small cost. A hasty mint chutney can be prepared fresh as needed, and is usually preferred in summer to Cachmere chutney. It is made in this way: Take a handful of fresh mint, a cupful of raisins, one of chillies, or the little red peppers, a half teaspoonful of salt and two tablespoonfuls of sugar. Put these ingredients into a mortar and pound until the mixture is juicy and soft. Stir and pour into a pretty glass or china jar. No cooking is required, and it will be found an admirable relish with cold meats.
A raw pounded chutney of the type still made daily across South Asia, though this version is unusually heavy on both raisins and chillies. Two things need attention before you start: the chilli quantity, and the fact that nothing here preserves the mixture.
- The chilli measureA full cup of small red chillies against a handful of mint is far hotter than most palates now expect, and the book does not say whether they are fresh or dried. Start with a few and taste as you pound; the raisins and sugar mask heat at first and it climbs as the mixture sits.
- Not a keeping chutneyThere is no vinegar, no cooking and only a half teaspoon of salt, so this has none of the preservation a bottled chutney relies on. Refrigerate it in a covered jar and use it within three or four days.
- Mortar or machineA food processor does the work in seconds, but pulse rather than run it — the point is a coarse, juicy paste, not a purée. If the mixture is stubborn, a spoonful of water or lemon juice loosens it without thinning the flavour.
- RaisinsThe recipe does not specify a type; ordinary dark raisins are a reasonable default. Soaking them in hot water for ten minutes makes them pound down far more readily and gives the juiciness the recipe asks for.
- Stems and seedsPick the mint leaves from the stalks; stems stay stringy under pounding. Whether you seed the chillies is a matter of how much heat you want, not of technique.
- "Cachmere chutney"The recipe contrasts the mint version with a "Cachmere" chutney but does not describe it. The contrast with "hasty" implies the Cachmere sort took longer to make and presumably kept, which is why this fresh one is offered as the summer alternative.
- YieldAbout a cup to a cup and a half, enough as a relish for six to eight servings of cold meat. Serve in small spoonfuls; it is a condiment, not a sauce.
Chutney reached British and American tables through the East India Company trade, and bottled chutneys had become a familiar item on the imported-goods shelf — expensive enough that home versions were a genuine economy, as the author points out. The word comes from the Hindi chatni, and in South Asian cooking it covers a huge range of preparations, many of them fresh pastes pounded on a stone and eaten the day they are made, rather than the sweet cooked preserves the British came to think of as chutney. The page here is headed simply "Chutney," and ends by recommending it with cold meats. The mint-and-raisin combination sits somewhere between the two traditions — closer in method to a genuine fresh chatni than many Victorian chutney recipes managed.