[Sca-cooks] chutney (was compost)

[Philip Troy]

On Friday 26 October 2001 06:27, johnna holloway wrote:
> Louise Smithson wrote: snipped
>   So are chutneys place in english cooking a
>
> > hangover from medieval cuisine.
>
>   Any thoughts on this matter gladly entertained.
>
> > Helewyse de Birkestad recipe snipped
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------
> Alan Davidson in his Oxford Companion to Food indicates
> that CHUTNEY is "the ordinary English spelling of the
> Indian word which used to be spelled chutni and is now
> chatni." It was adopted by the English early in their
> colonial days in India. According to OED, Chatni is Hindi.
> The OED quotes only go back to 1813. Laura Mason with
> Catherine Brown in Traditional Foods of Britain says that
> chutneys were gladly adopted as an addition to the then
> traditional recipes for jams and sour pickles. They do not
> draw any connection to medieval cookery.

Etymologically, perhaps, no, but in actual practice, pretty clearly. As has
been pointed out, Major-Grey-type chutneys are a comparative rarity in India
and appear to be pretty different from the yogurt/citrus type chutneys more
commonly found freshly made and eaten at meals in India. At least that's my
impression. (You kind of have to wonder where, since the culture isn't that
big on wine, or even beer until fairly recently, they're getting the vinegar
found in the preserve-type chutneys, or why they would make a preserve when
it seems quite practical to simply pound mint or coriander with yogurt, onion
and chili with lemon, or whatever. Apart from the common usage of dunking a
bit of bread into them while eating other foods, they don't really seem to
occupy any similar niche.)

Well, anyway, I suspect that what we're looking at is a re-introduction of an
English pseudo-ethnic food into the host culture (like the Worcestershire
sauce frequently used in dim sum houses, based on an English recipe for a
very roughly similar ketjap common all over southern Asia). Given that
England has a plethora of such potted, mixed pickles/preserves, and India
appears not to (at least not a lot that is really similar), I don't see how
this particular type of potted chutney could be said to _not_ derive from
some kind of earlier European cookery.

It might be interesting to look at parallel histories of other such
sauces/pickle mixes, such as chow-chow and picalilli, and even a few American
ones that have vanished by the wayside since the nineteenth century (there
was one whose name escapes me, which was essentially like modern tomato
ketchup, except it was made with cucumbers, boiled and sieved, and otherwise
treated like tomato ketchup... I want to say it was called Louis Napoleon
Sauce, but I don't think so...)

The bottom line would seem to be that the name, chutney, is not of English
origin, but the kind of sweet-and-sour preserves referred to as chutney in
English are probably mostly derived from a European tradition which may
easily go back to the middle ages.

Adamantius