Our good friends and neighbors left the other day for France to attend her mothers' birthday and a general family reunion. What they left behind for us was several pounds of beautiful Bartlett pears.
They'll be back an a couple of weeks but meanwhile they knew the fruit would just go to the birds if left on the tree, so while at a dog birthday party (which is another story) they handed off several large grocery bags of pears.
"Croustade!", was my first thought...but then common sense and my desire to still fit into my jeans got the better of me and ,"chutney!" was a close second.
I have a whole larder full of pickled and spiced items. It's how I fill my time while writing and watching the seasons pass here in Wine Country. I've got pickles and
cherries of several varieties, mango chutney, plum chutney, apricot chutney..I sound like Bubba from Forrest Gump. The one thing I don't have is any Pear Chutney.
In my search for good pear chutney recipes, I decided to look to the region of Kashmir where I know they grow wonderful fruit, especially pears. Surely there would be several good Kashmiri Pear Chutney recipes out there. I ran across several. One from Suvir Saran owner of the Devi Restaurant in NYC, others from my various Indian cookbooks. I can't say that any particularly called out to me. Then I thought, "hell, I've made tons of chutney, why can't I take advice from all of these recipes and come up with something I like", so I did.
I started out with several pounds of Bartlett Pears. One recipe called for the use of 3 1/2 pounds..about 6 pears..that however yielded only a 1 pt. jar of chutney. A lot of work for a little bit of good stuff. So the next morning, I decided to take the rest of my pears, and double the recipe I came up with and get at least two more pt. jars out of it.
So say you have about 6 lbs of Bartlett Pears, more or less. Here's what you do: