Why hello there, and welcome to a post that was a bad idea when I had it, and has only spiraled further out of control. I’m your Falconer of the Widening Gyre, Jon O’Guin, and today, we’re doing something new, because I don’t have the stones to do something well. Specifically, I said on Monday I’d probably talk about Chutneys for today. I then proceeded to volunteer to work Wednesday, on the statement “I can write the post Wednesday night, after all”, and then learned that there is a social event Wednesday night that will involve a not-insubstantial amount of drinking. Which means I now have ONE NIGHT to whip up most of a post about Chutneys…which I don’t want to make a “Quick Tip”, since we’re about to hit number 100, and I do NOT have the time to do a fully Looking in Abroad’s Pantries for India: It’s got over a BILLION PEOPLE. There are a thousand people who are “one in a million”. If 1% of Indians cook a dish a specific way, that is 13 million people, twice as many people who live in my state.

So I don’t have time to break down the whole country, so we’re just taking a peek, alright? Just a quick in-and-out to focus on one ASPECT of their cuisine, very broadly. So, let’s talk chutneys.

Chut Up and Dance with Me

Oh, good, we’re re-using the terrible pun. There’s a part of me that really wants to bail on this right now, and leave the discussion to Drunk Jon’s tender mercies, since at least HE won’t feel shame or trepidation about summarizing centuries of culinary traditions and literally millions of variations in around 1,000 words…and we might HAVE to, depending on how much I get done. BUT, to at least lay some groundwork before he flops onto the scene: Chutneys, what are they?

Well, Western Chutneys, as we described on Monday, are sort of sweet-and-tangy mixture, almost like a kind of spicy-sweet relish meeting a jam. The WORD chutney comes from Hindi/Urdu chatni, in turn coming from chāṭnā, meaning “to lick/eat with appetite”. So Chutney kind of means “tasty”, as a noun, and if that feels at all weird to you, I will highlight that the word RELISH also means “to enjoy greatly”, but you weren’t confused when I referred to it as a food item a second ago.

Though, when you START to think about Relish, it does get a little confusing. “Tiny pickle fragments?”

I specified Western Chutneys, because A: as implied earlier, there’s a lot more variation ‘permitted’ in Indian cooking: Your mother’s biryani will not taste quite like your aunt’s biryani, which won’t taste like your grandma’s, or your uncle’s; the saying goes that “every house in India has its own cuisine”. So on the one level, it’s impossible to exactly nail down “how everyone does things in India”… which stacks onto B: there are DOZENS of variations in chutneys, even as broad categories. I know one chutney that is a sort of sprinkled-on topping of pulverized peanuts and spices; another that is a paste of ground nuts and chili peppers; one that is a dip made of mint, cilantro, and green peppers; one that is a spicy tomato mixture; the list goes on and on. So the Major Grey’s chutney I highlighted on Monday, while most recognizable to European and American foodies, is only a small FRACTION of the world of Chutneys.

One prominent difference is that non-European style ones tend to be more savory, as that list of options probably suggests. Yes, there are prominent ones made with fruit: Major Grey’s is a replication of Mango chutney with a couple unique additions, but the fruit is often part of the broader flavor profile. Many chutneys are more pepper-centered, creating a spicy element you can add, or are rooted in a type of legume or other plant fat (coconut is a fairly common ingredient), to add richness. Many are acidic, adding brightness to dishes, and so on and so forth; essentially, Chutneys are kind of like paints on a culinary palette: you take the canvas of a normal dish, and add splashes of sweet, salty, fatty, spicy, as you see fit. Some dishes traditionally come with a specific chutney already added, while others give you the free rein to paint them as you see fit.

Is this a broad palette? No, but that’s because this is a picture of 5 different restaurants’ take on the same 2 chutneys.
Also, I really want to highlight that I’ve been using the artistic form of palette, instead of palate, which is the normal food one.

In a less artistic metaphor, think of them as the toppings at, say, a taco bar: there’s a couple salsas, guacamole, sour cream, some hot sauces, and you tweak the base taco to match what you want. And…shit, that’s not enough for a post, is it? Eight hundred, MAYBE nine hundred words? And we’re basically out of prep time. Shit, come on Youtube, give me something I can…ooh, I could talk about that. It’s not…100% on topic, but it’s like, 80%, and that’s enough for panicky Jon. So let’s take a quick jog on the wild side, so we can pack this up at a reasonable hour, yeah?

Deep in the Shit

On Monday, we spent a lot of time talking about the French name for Turkeys, and how that connected with India. Well, now, we’re going to talk about an ingredient the French call merde du Diable, or, “Devil’s Shit”. And it’s a little frustrating to talk about, because I’ve been kind of planning to talk about it eventually, so if I KNEW this was going to be today’s post, I’d have brought my container of it for a picture. Instead, I hope whatever picture I found is at least somewhat interesting.

Not SUPER interesting, but it does give a nice lead-in for how I’m going to change what I call it in the next paragraph.

This is asafetida, also known as hing/hingu in some of the Indian languages. (small note, sometimes the hing is spelt hinge (still presumably pronounced “heeng”, rather than “hinjuh”), which I was going to put in the first bit, but it turns out that “just the letter e in parentheses” is the shortcut for the Euro symbol in my version of Word) It is a resin you can harvest from a distant relative of celery that grows in…weirdly, NOT India: it actually grows in Afghanistan and Iran, where they call it badian, and they use it as a culinary medicine to reduce gas. By which I mean…hmm. Alright, you know how probiotics were big a couple years back? Everyone talked about eating more yogurt and fermented food for better gut health? For centuries, probably even millennia, a lot of countries had more specific, and numerous, ideas on what to eat to fix what. It’s a big, interesting topic we do NOT have time for right now. Anyway, on the CULINARY side, asafetida is a resin that is typically scraped into a powder, bloomed in oil, and used in…a whole LOT of Indian food. Why? Because it’s basically Middle Eastern MSG. Specifically, it adds a onion-y, umami flavor to dishes, and is supposed to mellow out and unify the flavors of a dish it’s added to. It is ALSO kept in secret, very tight containers, hidden away from other spices. Because of that French name (Devil’s Shit), and the Latin one: Asafetida directly means “fetid gum”, and, in case it’s been a while since you needed that particular SAT word, fetid means “reeking”. The resin itself, pre-grinding, and even (to a lesser extent) after grinding, STINKS. It smells like a mixture of onions and sulfur. If you DON’T seal it in an air-tight container, it will contaminate nearby spices with its smell.

However, it’s that same potency that makes it desirable: when you get down to it, the chemicals that make the flavors in onions and garlic that people like ARE sulfur-related, and cooking the potently pungent hing causes it particular batch to mellow out to something more like, well, onions and garlic. Which is great, because there’s cultural weight against eating either of those ingredients in some Indian medicines, and Eastern religions (Buddhism specifically says people shouldn’t eat garlic or onions because it makes them gassy and irritable.) So some chefs use hing instead of garlic or onions, while OTHERS use it in addition to them, to enhance the flavor/offset the gassiness. (The logic being “if I put something that makes people gassy in, and something that makes them NOT gassy in, then I even out to “normal amount of gassy”)”

In retrospect,. I knew better than to google “Inflated Goofy”. I found the pic I wanted, but the cost was wading through definitely quasi-sexual depictions.

Why discuss this now? Because, surprise, if India has a specific ingredient they use to increase the umami/savory quotient of their dishes, and Chutneys are often a savory topping, then yes, duh, many chutney recipes call for hing, in the same way that I frequently complain that every American savory recipe starts with “dice/slice/chop an onion”. “First bloom some hing” is the “first, make a roux” of Indian cuisine.

It’s also a valuable component in what is sometimes called the “chhonk”, and no, that is not the name for the sound of a dying goose. Chhonk, also called tadka, vagar, oggarane, and did I mention there are like, 7 different “Indian” languages spoken in the country? I feel like it’s kind of relevant. Anyhow, chhonk is the name for it in Uttar Pradesh (that’s the part of India with the Taj Mahal), which is where Priya Krishna’s family is from, and she’s the chef I learned about it from, so that’s the term I use. Chhonk is a specific preparation in Indian cuisine sometimes also seen in Chinese cooking, of using “tempered” oil: getting a relatively small amount of oil, and blooming a couple specific spices in it to drizzle over a finished dish to add another element of flavor.

And that’s all you need to know about hing, and a brief overview of what chutneys are, and this could be smoother, but the last couple paragraphs have been hammered out by “Not-That-Drunk” Jon trying to ensure that when he passes out in 10 minutes at 2:30, that morning Jon will only KIND OF hate him. We got AN ending to the post, we bought chocolate donuts for breakfast, and we drank like, a quart and a half of water during the libations. WE LEAVE THE REST TO YOU!

Honestly, you did pretty good, Drunk-ish Jon.

MONDAY: IT’S LABOR DAY. MAYBE I’LL TAKE THE DAY OFF. YOU DON’T KNOW.

THURSDAY: MAYBE I’LL FIGURE SOMETHING OUT ON LABOR DAY.