A Good Thing to Do with Chutney

When the peaches here are super ripe and thudding to the ground in the slightest breeze, I race around like mad trying to scoop them up before the hornets eat them and they melt into the ground. I’ve canned them, and frozen some, made pie and chutney (the recipe appeared here a few years ago). As with many preserves, the question ends up being, what to do with all that chutney (and jam and jelly) which seems like such a good idea at the time but fills cupboards which remain stuffed for months.

A couple weeks ago, some dear old friends came for supper and one, Bev Rogers, a summer neighbor, brought a lovely dip for vegetables or crackers. It was so good that I asked Bev how she made it and learned that it had chutney in it. Aha! She obliged with her recipe a couple days later.

Almost anything in the world tastes good with cream cheese and sour cream in, on, or over it, and this recipe rests on a solid base of the two. It also calls for curry and chopped onion, and says more chutney to taste if desired. With several quarts of the stuff on hand, you bet I added more chutney. The directions say that if the chutney is very liquid, drain it a little.

Mixing this up is pretty painless, but if you are feeling very weary and don’t want to wash an extra dish or two, you can easily get away with merely dumping chutney on top of a block of cream cheese and letting the eaters spread it on their crackers. Actually, it would be good on goat cheese, too.

Curry Chutney Dip
Serves: Make 1½ cups
 
Ingredients
  • 2 teaspoons curry, or more to taste
  • 1 8-ounce package cream cheese or Neuchatel cheese
  • ¼ cup sour cream
  • ¼ cup chutney, Major Grey’s or homemade
  • ¼ cup finely chopped onion
Instructions
  1. Let cream cheese soften to room temperature.
  2. Mix cream cheese with all other ingredients until it is smooth.
  3. Sample, and add more chutney or curry powder if desired, to taste.

 

Sandy Oliver

About Sandy Oliver

Sandy Oliver Sandy is a freelance food writer with the column Taste Buds appearing weekly since 2006 in the Bangor Daily News, and regular columns in Maine Boats, Homes, and Harbors magazine and The Working Waterfront. Besides freelance food writing, she is a pioneering food historian beginning her work in 1971 at Mystic Seaport Museum, where she developed a fireplace cooking program in an 1830s house. After moving to Maine in 1988, Sandy wrote, Saltwater Foodways: New Englanders and Their Foods at Sea and Ashore in the 19th Century published in 1995. She is the author of The Food of Colonial and Federal America published in fall of 2005, and Giving Thanks: Thanksgiving History and Recipes from Pilgrims to Pumpkin Pie which she co-authored with Kathleen Curtin. She often speaks to historical organizations and food professional groups around the country, organizes historical dinners, and conducts classes and workshops in food history and in sustainable gardening and cooking. Sandy lives on Islesboro, an island in Penobscot where she gardens, preserves, cooks and teaches sustainable lifeways.