Back in the autumn of 2005, I made a batch of elderberry, apple and onion chutney - I think maybe we had a problem with storage space or something, resulting in some of the filled, sealed jars being put back into the box that the new, empty jars came out of.
So here we are a little over two years later and I’ve stumbled across these three little jars of vintage chutney. And it’s really rather good. The purple-staining dye-like colour of the berries has faded into a sort of mellow browny maroon and all the flavours have mellowed into a deeply fruity and aromatic yummyness. I just had a sandwich of good white bread, butter, grated parmesan and this chutney, and it’s quite, quite lovely.
Reminds me of this eccentric fellow I knew while I was living in Ecuador. He was from Korea, and he was the proprietor of a video arcade completely stocked with video games he’d built out of parts illegally shipped to him by his family back in Korea. The title screen of every game was completely in Korean or Japanese, with the only English being THIS UNIT IS FOR USE IN SOUTHEAST ASIA ONLY. Among his many eccentricities were washing and ironing his money (literally, in his sink and on an ironing board which was just for money; his clothes were ironed on a separate board), and burying jars of kimchee in the front yard. Each bottle’s burial place was marked with a chopstick that had a tiny flag of white surgical tape attached. On the flag he would write, in Sharpie, the interrment date of that batch of kimchee. His front yard looked like Arlington cemetery. Anytime we would visit him, he would dig up a jar of kimchee for us as a parting gift. He explained, in his halting Spanish, the difference between the various vintages: More old mean less spicy, more sour. Great, crazy dude.
Anyway, your chutney made me think of him and his buried trove of cabbage.
You are basically Tom Good from The Good Life, aren’t you? I can’t help feeling that if nuclear armageddon ever arrives, emerging from the fallout will be cockroaches, militias in Montana who will probably implode in short order, and Mangetout.
