Welcome to Chutney Junction.
Draw yourself up a stewpan and we’ll boll you with raisins.
For this [is an] apricot chutney, the golden tide from a tree of plenty.
Spread it on your stomach and put yourself between a couple of slices of bread.
This can be your scene, too.
Oh the wild, dangerous kitchen cacophony of clashing bottles, oh the stirring spoons and lurid bubbles, the lava-like overflow from the saucepans, hot-footing it after our Argentine ants.
There are people among this bedlam; wild-eyed, apricot coloured people. They’ll put you in a bottle and dab a label on you. Do not open until March
Some of us are even married to them.
One was on the phone just now.
“I’m on the next batch,” she said. Her voice was steamy.
My phone vibrated like a jet engine.
“Thar she blows,” she screamed. And then silence. But not quite.
A bubbling, hissing, unspeakable background noise.
What had happened, I asked myself, in this suburban Rotorua. Had final lava-like avalanche of chutney flushed away the kitchen furniture into molten oblivion.
Would I go home to a chutney crater where once my five-roomed house with the paint-shy sleepout. had stood, sleeping peacefully among its white ants and blackbirds with the mortgage moss-gathering in sleepy instalments under the shady eaves?
It all goes back a long way, to the planting of the apricot tree. We were young then, the worry lines but a faint hint on our fresh young skins.
Plant apricot trees, someone had told my wife. They bear well, they said.
Our apricot tree has borne well. In fact, it has borne everything before it. It has become a fecund medusa, casting spells, trapping us in the relentless cycle of its fruiting season. Hundreds have tramped and clambered around it, trying to denude its branches, only to withdraw pale and defeated into their own sullen chutney making.
Several times I’ve taken an axe to the tree. But an inner voice has said: this is beneficent Nature spreading her largesse. Be thankful. Be grateful. And I’ve weakened sobbing against the tree’s trunk as the chutney-coloured sunset blazed in the west.
When it comes to apricots, I know I’m yellow.
And sooner or later you get hooked on chutney making.
People form chutney associations and have chutney tastings. No more elegant sauces, no more sandwich relish, no more commercial condiments.
The whole year becomes a yellow haze of chutney. One races against time consuming it. For the tree will be fruiting again, it already looks pregnant. And the stewpan moves uneasily in the cupboard.
Now people have taken to visiting us outside the chutney season. Our chutney has been left on a hundred doorsteps.
Only this week an official found me loitering with a wrapped cylindrical object beside a letter box and he flung himself defiantly in front of it, shouting. “Post no chutney?” This morning I began sneezing raisins.
But it’s the last batch tonight. It will be a moment of great emotion.
I will look at her fondly as she seals the last bottle.
I will take her in my arms and whisper: “Mais oui, cherie, you are wearing my favourite perfume. Chutney No. 5.”
We will drink a little toast.
What is there left but to take a couple of jars and get yourself pickled!
Max Fatchen