CHUTNEY Part III

Bloggiana and I have our first chutney engagement. This is every bit as daunting as it sounds. For we have been invited by the North Lunedale & District’s Women’s Institute Chutney Appreciation Committee to give a half-day conference on chutney.

Now I have to admit I am not particularly well-informed about the Women’s Institute. But as I understand it, the North Lunedale and District Federation has been going for some time now and takes its interest in chutney, as in all home-preserve-making, Very Seriously Indeed. When Mrs Florence Tidy-Hatless of the Village Rectory in Cow Brow issued us with the invitation, she did so with four important provisos. We should give a 40-50 talk on chutney. We should try and incorporate into the afternoon something more ambitious, say, a guide to world history as shaped by chutney. We should do blind tastings (bearing in mind, Mrs Tidy-Hatless reminded us, that we would be addressing an informed audience.) (Indeed.) And finally we should be prepared to hand out at least one, if not two, original recipes at conference end.

So, all in all, in Our House, the general atmosphere over the last week has been reminiscent of that of a Panic Station. In one corner, I am trying to conjure up new and fiendish Chutney Combinations which we hope will give Mrs Tidy-Hatless’s crew something jolly tough to chew on. Would they get Fennel & Chocolate Chutney? How about Ginger and Quince? Or Quince and Uggli? In another corner, Bloggiana too is doing her best for Chutney Innovation, thinking of new titles for our concoctions, new angles. What if we take a leaf out of the Pimms marketing team’s book and number our chutneys? And then we could say all our recipes were absolutely secret? And then we wouldn’t have to go through the awful palaver of trying to remember what the hell we put in the chutney in the first place and what in the name of God were the proportions. How about making chutney from macadaemias and calling it Nutney, asks Bloggiana brightly? Or painting cars all over the jars and calling it Jitney? We could put tufts of white hair on the lids and call it Hockney. Or just hang the odd lamb’s tail on our chutney uniform and say what we were selling was not chutney but mutney.

Upstairs, an hour or so later and now our attentions have turned to the Research end of the project. Bloggiana and I are googling for all our worth, mugging up like mad. Or trying to. For the awful thing is we can’t find out any more than we already know about chutney and that is not really very much. I looked up the Charge of the Light Brigade online and tried to see if I could find any references to chutney as shaping the path of the calamity. There were none. I looked up Partition in India – did chutney come into the general hindu-muslim divide? Apparently not. Bloggiana tried to go further east and went for Malaysia. They seem to have one or two interesting chutney ideas – but did chutney come into their fight for independence? Not even slightly.

Bloggiana and I begin to feel a bit panicked. The date is looming. There is a man on electricalappliancesallyourquestionsanswered.dot.com who says chutney caused his microwave to break down. And that’s pretty much it. Can we find enough things to say about chutney that will fill 40-50 minutes? Can we demonstrate that chutney has in any way shaped the history of the world? Bloggiana and I spend the night googling for our lives’ worth. It seems a dead cert that unless things turn around very suddenly, Mrs Tidy-Hatless and her cronies are going to be able to expose us – as the out-and-out jumped up chutney frauds we almost certainly are. Fuck me, says Bloggiana, time for a mug full of PG. We swill it back in unison. And find ourselves quaking.

To be continued.