CHUTNEY Part II

So I have pinned my flag to the chutney cruiseliner, says Bloggiana. Which navigational chart do you think I should follow? We are sitting, Bloggiana and I, in a kitchen full of apples going dry or brown, full of special-offer dates and mouse-nibbled chillies and jamjars rescued from a healthfood shop that still sport a distinct tinge of organic rusting about their lids. It’s funny you should ask, I counter, because I was wondering the very same thing myself.

Faced with this mountain of fruit to peel, core and chop, with the looming deadline of her first chutney gig and the prospect of having to hand-write a lot of hand-written labels, Bloggiana and I decide there’s only one thing for it. Let’s go and indulge in a quick session of mid-afternoon google, we chime.

And what a world it is we open up. Wikipedia and Websters and Britannica and a host of others boast chutney write-ups. Amazon claims to sell five thousand six hundred and twenty-nine books on chutney. Google sports three million nine hundred and ninety thousand references to chutney. Did you know you can make shrimp chutney? Or peanut chutney? Or chocolate-cherry chutney? (yuk.) Did you know that back in 1998, a swashbuckling Fijian marketeer with an eye to the main chance caused a furore when he created Cannibal Chutney? (Does that mean he made chutney out of cannibals, we wonder aloud? Or that the chutney he made should be eaten solely with cold cannibal?)

Did you know that the word chutney comes from the Hindu word chatni meaning to crush? Or that it comes from the Sanskrit word for licking? Or that it has lent its name to many, many London restaurants and a thriving kind of music in Trinidad & Tobago? Did you know that according to the rhyming dictionary, the word chutney rhymes with whitney, jitney, cockney, baloney and mccartney? There is a film about a lesbian love affair called Chutney Popcorn. One K Raghavendra Rao wrote a critique on Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children entitled The Novel as History as Chutney (sic). In Nagaland, they make chutney from fish.

Bloggiana and I are dazzled, nay confused by this welter of information. Many of the internet chutney contentions sound false, cribbed from each other, magnified, then spouted as chutney gospel. Recipes sound remarkably similar, stolen, bastardised, handed on, then stolen back. We canter through food websites and food blogs and foodie guides. We peruse as many of the 3,990,000 entries as our mid-afternoon window will allow. Finally, we retire exhausted, our parting gesture a game to find our favourite chutney name. Bloggiana likes the sound of Pudina Kothamalli Pachadi. Me, I’m quite excited by the sound of Mr Vikki’s Hot Banana. Either way, we figure, it’s time to return to the cruiseliner and set sail. Before the high seas of the wine-dark internet delay us any further.