Home-made Chutney

Autumn, I’m afraid, is a coming in, as a medieval poet might say.  Or, as Keats phrased it, “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, close-bosomed friend of the maturing sun.”  I admit you’d have to look pretty damn hard to see any sun in Manchester recently – the mist element has been stressed rather a lot, also the pelting rain – but it did dry up long enough last weekend to let me pick the apples.

We’ve got two smallish apple trees, a Worcester Pearmain and a Granny Smiths and both trees have produced a bumper crop.

So what on earth do you do with zillions of apples?  Eat them, yes, I’d got as far as that myself, but there’s a limit to how many apples even a family our size can munch through.  So I turned to chutney.

Wow.  It’s gorgeous.  There’s something about home-made chutney that knocks any other sort of pickle into a cocked hat.  What you should do, according to the recipe, is leave the chutney in a cool dark cupboard for two to three months (and if that’s not handy for Christmas, I don’t know what is.)  The trouble is, it tastes so fantastic, we’ve been through two jars already, and, as it’s just crying out for a knock-your-socks-off cheddar to go with it, it’s not doing my diet any good.

Here’s the recipe if you want to give it a go.

1 pound of onions

4 pounds of apples

8 ounces of dried fruit

1 ounce of ginger

1 ounce of paprika

1 ounce of mixed spice

1 ounce of salt

1 and a half pounds of granulated sugar

A pint and a half of malt vinegar

Chop up the apples and the onions and put them into a big pan. The great thing about using up the apples in this way, is that you can use all the very tiny ones that will never be much good for eating.  I put them into the vinegar right away, and then they don’t start going brown and sad looking.  Add everything else, bring it to the boil and then let it simmer for three hours or so.  Give it a stir every so often.  You can tell it’s ready when it goes fairly thick and, if you draw a wooden spoon across the mixture, it leaves a channel that doesn’t immediately fill with liquid.

In the meantime, sterilize your jam-jars.  The easiest way of doing this is to put a titchy bit of cold water in the bottom and give each jar a minute in the microwave.  You’ll have to sterilize the  lids too, and the easiest way to do that is by boiling them in water for a while.  (Five minutes or so should do it.)  Then – carefully because they’re hot (der!) – put the jars in a warm oven to dry out.

Then put the chutney into the warm jars with a little greaseproof or waxed paper insert on top of the chutney.  That stops the metal in the lid reacting with the vinegar in the chutney.  Then wait two to three months… if you can!