Sharp, tart, colourful – rhubarb is one of my all-time favourite fruit/vegetables. I played around with it la few years ago when making my favourite summer drink, a rhubarb cordial (rhabarber schorle), and made the supremely delicious (and dangerously addictive) rhubarb and ginger oat cookies from Anna Jones. This year, as well as already having made multiple batches of the cookies, I wanted to try using it differently, and remembered a sweet and savoury rhubarb chutney I’d tried at a friend’s. We’d eaten huge dollops of it with bread and cheese, and savoured every mouthful – this had to be my rhubarb project for this year.
After a frantic search through my emails based on a vague recollection of having received the recipe months ago, I finally found the hidden treasure: a family recipe that had been passed down, and translated into English with the briefest instructions -“Mix liquid with sugar until dissolved. Combine everything until it reaches a good consistency.” There were lots of pinches of this, and a handful of that, which I loved. That to me meant that this chutney has been made so often that one doesn’t need to weigh the ingredients, one call tell by eye how much of everything is needed. It made me feel very honoured to have been trusted with this family treasure, and that’s why I’m being a bit cagey about revealing what’s in it. Needless to say, there’s lots of ginger to go with the rhubarb, but it’s not as purely sweet as you might imagine. However, because I’m not a monster, I’ve found another good recipe that I can share with you from Riverford that also sounds mouthwateringly good.
The chutney, as the instructions suggested, was surprisingly simple to make, and although I have made chutney in the past, none have been as successful as this one. I quartered the recipe as I didn’t want to be overrun with chutney (a mistake I’ve made previously) but at the rate, we’re going through it, I wish I’d made more. This new thing was an unbridled success: a simple, delicious recipe, that had been passed on with love – there’s simply nothing better in my eyes.
New Day, New Thing 