Chutney, Yet Again.

Regular readers will be only too well aware that one of my favourite blog tactics is to start with the idea of ‘many ways’ to use (or make) an ingredient or dish – such as porridge, or lemon butter, or popcorn, or mustard, for example. Today I want to have a little recipe-trivia fun with one of my all-time favourite concepts – chutney. Chutney is definitely more of a concept than a recipe, don’t you think.

One of this week’s sources, Charles Herman Senn’s Book of Sauces (Chicago, 1915) gave us an insight into classical cuisine’s classic compound butters. Amongst the traditional delights Senn gave us Chutney Butter; he also gives the following interesting recipe:

Chutney Sauce.
Make a sauce the same as directed for venison sauce [given below], omitting the red currant jelly, and adding instead one heaped-up tablespoonful of mango chutney, which must be chopped up rather finely.
Venison Sauce.
Put into a saucepan half a pint of good brown sauce, a dessertspoonful of red currant jelly, half a glass of port wine, and the juice of half a lemon. Next add a dessertspoonful of meat glaze, boil up again, then skim, strain and serve.

And now for something completely different, because sometimes - just sometimes - ‘different’ is a good enough reason. From Random Recipes, an undated charity cookbook published by and sold for the benefit of the Society for Seamen’s Children, I give you:


Chutney Toast.
Add to the popular bacon and peanut butter, spread on toast, a little chopped Major Grey’s Chutney to give that “different taste.”

Soup being one of my deepest and most faithful loves, I had to see if chutney soup existed anywhere in the world. Imagine my profound disappointment when I discovered this:


Chutney Soup.
3 cups cooked elbow macaroni
1 cup chopped celery
½ cup chopped pickle
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon pepper
½ cup salad dressing
½ cup dairy sour cream
1 cup cooked peas
Lettuce
Pimiento
Mix macaroni lightly with celery, pickle, and seasonings. Toss. Add salad dressing and sour cream. Fold in peas. Arrange salad in bowl. Garnish with crisp lettuce and pimiento slices.
The Gleaner (newspaper from Kingston, Jamaica) October 19, 1963

This is the soup you make when you are really making salad. I felt cheated. I did not allow my disappointment to delay my quest however, and eventually found the following recipe for
‘real’ chutney soup - depending on your definition of ‘real’ that is.


Apple Chutney Soup.
2 cans (10 ¾ ounces each) cream of asparagus soup.
1 can (10 ¾ ounces) cream of celery soup.
½ teaspoon curry powder
3 soup cans water
2 teaspoons chopped chutney
1 cup chopped apple.
In saucepan, blend soups and curry powder: gradually stir in water. Add chutney and apple. Heat, stirring occasionally. Makes 8 cups.
Tucson Daily Citizen, January 21, 1976

Before I finish this little ode to chutney, may I remind you of the previous posts on the topic -
A Chutney Emergency, and Chutney, Again.



Quotation for the Day.

All Chatneys should be quite thick, almost of the consistence of mashed turnips or stewed tomatoes, or stiff bread sauce. They are served with curries; and also with steaks, cutlets, cold meat, and fish.
Eliza Acton, Modern Cookery for Private Families (1845)

Stinking Garlic.

November 20 ...

Sir John Harington, the “saucy godson” of Queen Elizabeth I, and the man who first got the idea of the flush toilet died on this day in 1612. The idea never came to anything in Harington’s lifetime – the idea was well ahead of its time, and he was also perhaps too busy being what we would call in Australia “a larrikin”, getting into various scrapes that did not impress his godmother. It was over two hundred years before Thomas Crapper in nineteenth century England made the concept real (Victorian England was exactly the right time and place for such an invention), for which we will all be forever grateful.

Harington is not featuring in today’s story on account of his method of disposing human excrement - although one could argue its relevance to a food blog – but because of the quotation attributed to him on the topic of garlic.

"And scorn not garlic like some that think, it only maketh men wink and drink and stink"

Harington was an author and poet, and in between bouts of being “a bit of a lad”, he translated the famous Medical Poem of Salerno. The Medical School of Salerno in Italy was founded in the ninth century, and associated with it (although possibly not written there), is a long poem called the Regimen Sanitatis Salernitatem. The poem discusses general health measures such as diet and exercise, bowel habits, wine-drinking and so on, and it became enormously popular and was expanded numerous times and translated into many languages.

Harington’s work was the first English translation, and the garlic quotation comes from the verse which relates to protection from poisoning. It clearly explains the belief behind the inclusion of garlic in the famous plague-protecting ‘Vinegar of the Four Thieves.’

Six things, that here in order shall ensue,
Against all poisons have a secret power,
Pear, Garlic, Radish-roots, Nuts, Rape, and Rue,
But Garlic chief; for they that it devour,
May drink, and care not who their drink do brew:
May walk in airs infected every hour.
Sith Garlic then hath powers to save from death,
Bear with it though it make unsavory breath:
And scorn not Garlic, like to some that think
It only makes men wink, and drink, and stink.

For our recipe today we jump ahead again to the Victorian era. Mrs Beeton was not a fan of garlic. She says “The smell of this plant is generally considered offensive. … It was in greater repute with our ancestors than it is with ourselves, although it is still used as a seasoning herb. On the continent, especially in Italy, it is much used, and the French consider it an essential in many made dishes.”

Garlic does appear in a few of “her” recipes (she collected, she did not author them), and there is a prodigious amount in her recipe for Mango ‘Chetney’. I picked out this recipe as the mango season has started in earnest here in Queensland, and I thought that local readers might particularly enjoy it. Strangely however, the recipe contains no mango. There is no formal acknowledgement of the use of apples as the subsitute – an obvious and convenient substitute given that mangoes would have been difficult to source in England. The recipe was supplied to her by an “English lady, who had long been a resident in India, and who, since her return to her native country, has become quite celebrated amongst her friends for the excellence of this Eastern relish” – presumably this Lady used mangoes while she was in India? Why is this recipe not called Apple Chetney?

Bengal Recipe For Making Mango Chetney.
1 ½ lbs. of moist sugar, ¾ lb. of salt, ¼ lb. of garlic, ¼ lb. of onions, ¾ lb. of powdered ginger, ¼ lb. of dried chilies, ¾ lb. of mustard-seed, ¾ lb. of stoned raisins, 2 bottles of best vinegar, 30 large unripe sour apples.
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 half-bottle 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.
[Use green mangoes, my local friends, it will be delicious]

Tomorrow’s Story …

School Food.

Quotation for the Day ..

Chutney is marvelous. I'm mad about it. To me, it's very imperial. Dianna Vreeland.