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Bengal Chutney

A chutney made with brown sugar, salt, ground mustard, garlic, onion, ginger, raisins, cayenne pepper, vinegar, apples, and tomatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Garlic and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Bengal Chutney

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the garlic, onion, and raisins finely.

Cook

  1. Boil the apples and tomatoes in vinegar until quite soft, then bruise them.

  2. Mix all ingredients together.

  3. Cook until thoroughly soft.

Bottle

  1. Bottle.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Mustard + garlictop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  3. Mustard + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Garlic + gingertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,402 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Apples
Their pectin helps thicken the chutney as they soften and break down.
Tomatoes
They break down into moisture and body, giving the chutney a soft, spreadable texture.
Vinegar
Its acidity sharpens the flavour and helps preserve the chutney.
Brown sugar
It adds sweetness that balances the sourness of the vinegar and apples.
Cayenne pepper
It adds heat that gives the chutney its sharp, spicy bite.

The step that matters

Cook until thoroughly soft. Long simmering breaks down the apple and tomato fibre and drives off excess liquid, which sets the texture. Stopping early leaves the chutney thin and the fruit firm.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, mustard, garlic, onion, ginger, pepper, vinegar):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Avocadofits better
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, mustard, garlic, onion, ginger, pepper, vinegar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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