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Chutney

A preserved apple chutney with tamarind, raisins, spices, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and tamarind work together. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 325 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Chutney

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Peel and chop the apples, then boil them to a pulp in the vinegar.

  2. Transfer the apple mixture to a basin and let it cool.

  3. Finely chop the chillies, garlic, and shallots.

  4. Once the apples are cold, add all the other ingredients.

  5. Put the mixture in bottles and place them near the fire for several days.

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. Ginger + tamarindtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together325 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Tamarind + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together149 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Garlic + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  4. Ginger + garlictop 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
Break down into a pulp to form the body of the chutney.
Vinegar
Cooks the apples to a pulp and acts as the acidic preserving liquid.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the sharpness of the vinegar and tamarind.
Salt
Seasons the chutney and helps preserve it.
Raisins
Add sweetness and body to the chutney.

The step that matters

Let the apple mixture cool before adding the other ingredients. Adding the remaining ingredients to hot apple pulp can affect their texture and flavour, so the record's instruction to wait until the apples are cold matters.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Cherryfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, ginger, tamarind, garlic, mustard, vinegar, raisin. 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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