What comes to mind when you hear the word chutney? The green coriander-mint chutney served in restaurants or the sweet date-tamarind chutney that’s a must with chaats? Think again, and this time think about what chutney looked like at home, in your childhood, when it would uplift a simple dal-rice or roti-sabzi meal by many notches.It’s a dash of flavour that defies definition, changing from one community to another, from one region to another. It’s a shapeshifter that can be dry, coarse, runny or thick. “Our culinary landscape is vast and incredibly nuanced, and the concept of chutney is also limitless,” says award-winning author and culinary chronicler Rushina Munshaw-Ghildiyal, who spent nearly a decade documenting chutneys across the country. In 2017, she also started Indian Food Observance Days and one of the ten days was dedicated to chutneys. It was celebrated year on year. She put out an open call for people across the country to celebrate it in any way they liked. It picked up, with people using #ChutneyDay to share stories and recipes. Brands joined in, and September 24 is now celebrated as Chutney Day.Last year, it all came together in the form of a deliciously illustrated, over-500-page book, Chutney: A Compendium of Stories and Recipes. It features around 230 recipes and inputs from over 120 regional food experts, capturing what chutneys look like across India — from Kashmir, Haryana, Jharkhand, Manipur, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh to communities such as the Bohri, Sindhi, Saraswat, Anglo-Indian and Syrian Christian.For Munshaw-Ghildiyal, the reasons for embarking on this journey were two-fold: chutney connects people on a fundamental level and it has also suffered from homogenisation.“Similar to how people talk about ‘curry’ not really existing as a single dish, chutney too underwent a broad-stroke flattening as it travelled around the world,” she says. “Even the word ‘chutney’ was popularised by the colonials; different parts of India historically had different names for it. In the south, it was recorded as thuvaiyal. Ayurvedic texts refer to it as katni or catni, and lehya — inspired by the act of licking. Traditionally, it was just a small dot on the plate.”Using whatever is on hand Assamese Fermented mustard KharoliaFor Kashmiri Nath, 56, an Assamese food chronicler, chutney was “something fun — created out of nothing.” A little leftover fresh green pea curry, for instance, could become one. The same resourcefulness shaped Anuradha Joshi Medhora’s childhood in Indore. There was a chutney with every meal and it was, as she puts it, “the flavour bomb”. What went into it depended on what came from the family garden: amrud, amla, dhania, pudina, kairi, narangi, shehtut, figs, mahua. Then there were the scraps — lauki, pumpkin, ridge gourd and ivy gourd peels, toasted with sesame, mustard, lime and whatever else was at hand. Then, of course, the beej ki chutneys: kathal ke beej, kaddu ke beej, tarbooz ke beej, lauki ke beej. Whatever seeds you had, you found a way to turn them into something delicious.”There was no refrigeration then, she points out, and the logic was simple: use what you had before it went to waste.Story continues below this adIt is a logic that appears again and again across regions.In Andhra Pradesh, Hyderabad-based chef Vignesh Ramachandran, chef-partner at Theta Theta Telugu and Coffee Sangam, describes Telugu food as a treasure trove of chutneys. “Virtually any vegetable can be turned into one,” he says. In Telugu, chutney is called pachadi, and there is pachadi made from aubergine, ridge gourd, bottle gourd, ivy gourd, raw mango, cabbage and tomato.His grated raw mango chutney, made with fresh coconut, chilli powder, salt and finished with a tempering of mustard seeds, curry leaves and dried red chillies, is very different from the chopped or pickled mango preparations many are familiar with.In Assam, the tools too were part of the process. Nath recalls the dheki, a foot-operated pounding device used when families lived jointly and larger batches were required. Hard fruits such as hog plum were pounded whole. Softer star fruit was chopped and roughly pounded on a silbata, then served with chilli, mustard oil, salt and coriander. Lentils also found their way into chutney.Sour, sweet and seasonalStory continues below this ad Pnepe-r Plastic Chutney by SujoyBefore chutney, Bengal had tok and ombol. Today, they sit in harmony with one another.“Tok and ombol are largely used interchangeably depending on where you hail from, but the word tok literally translates to ‘sour’. It’s a sour palate cleanser and has a definite place in a Bengali meal,” says Kolkata-based Sujoy Chatterjee, co-founder of Amar Khamar, which brings Bengal’s indigenous produce from farms to tables.An old tamarind tok, he says, works well between the protein course and dessert. Sometimes, tok is eaten with a little rice so that the rice absorbs the sourness better. It is usually runny, and fish can also be used — early autumn, for instance, is the time for tok/ombol made with the head of hilsa.Chutney, in contrast, is fruitier, sweeter and thicker. “Papaya chutney with lime juice is a classic,” he says.Story continues below this adChutney takes Chatterjee back to another time: weddings in the 1980s, when cooks arrived with large utensils and made big batches of tomato chutney with dates, cashews and raisins. Seasonality still decides what appears on many plates — Jolphai chutney in Assam in winter, kul’er chutney during Saraswati Puja in Bengal, raw mango tok in summer.The chutney pantryUp north in Kashmir, chutney is not an occasional accompaniment either. “Chutneys are an integral part of Kashmiri food culture, whether it’s the Kashmiri Muslim Wazwan or Pandit cuisine,” says chef Prateek Sadhu, a Kashmiri who grew up in Delhi.Three are considered essential: “Doon Chetin, made with walnuts; Mujj Chetin, made with radish and particularly integral to weddings; and Pudin Chetin, made with Kashmiri mint, which is notably peppery,” says chef-founder of award-winning restaurant, Naar.The method matters as much as the ingredients. A Kashmiri stone mortar and pestle is used to crush radish with salt, green chillies and kala jeera before yoghurt is added. For the walnut version, walnuts, radish, onions and soaked dried Kashmiri red chillies are mashed together, with yoghurt acting as a binder. These are not seasonal, they are constants.Story continues below this ad Sukhti ChutneyChef Thomas Zacharias, founder of The Locavore, remembers a similar insistence on method from his Kerala home, where what is broadly called chutney in English is usually chammanthi or chammandhi. His grandmother, Ammamma’s ulli chammandi, made with green chillies, coconut oil and shallots and eaten with boiled tapioca, was always made with a mortar and pestle. That chutney later inspired the version of Eggs Kejriwal when The Bombay Canteen opened in February 2015.Zacharias says his work with The Locavore has only reinforced how astonishing the range is: chutneys can be made from cultivated or foraged leaves, flowers, fruit, seeds, vegetable scraps, wild herbs, dried fish, fermented ingredients and even ants.Also Read | From paan daan to luxury hampers: How the humble betel leaf is getting a premium makeover Futkal Chutney by Dr. Manisha OraonWhen chutney is the mealFor Shahu Patole, who hails from the Mang community in Marathwada, chutney wasn’t an accompaniment. It was the meal.Story continues below this ad“Some of us still have to run to the fields to work and don’t have the luxury of buying and making vegetables, so what would we do? Take a bhakri, put on a little kharda or thecha and the meal is done,” says the 64-year-old, who chronicled the foodways of Dalit communities in his 2016 Marathi book Anna He Apoorna Brahma, translated into English as Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada in 2024.Dry chutneys were common at his home because they lasted longer. They typically combined red chilli powder, salt and another ingredient — peanuts (Shengadanayachi chatni), flax seeds (Jawasachi chatni), roselle (Ambadaichi chatni), dry prawn (Zinge) or dry Bombay duck (Bombilachi chatani). The main ingredient was roasted on a tawa, then pounded by hand with chilli, salt and, when available, garlic and coriander. There was also tikhat, simply red chilli powder and salt. kharde by Shahu PatoleWet chutneys included thecha, made by pounding green chillies with salt; roasted chillies turned it into kharda. Then there was ola yesur: onions placed directly on the hot chulha after the bhakris were cooked, allowed to soften and then pounded with roasted green chilli and salt.“We wouldn’t have oil. So we would cook meat in salt and turmeric, if available garlic-ginger paste and coriander and once done, add this ola yesur to give it more flavour,” Patole says.More than a condimentStory continues below this adA chutney with fish or meat has been a staple in some parts of the country. In Assam, fish was dried and smoked above the wood-fire kitchen stove on a bamboo rack called a chunga. When little else was available, it was pounded with chilli, chopped onion, mustard oil and salt. In Madhya Pradesh, leftovers from fish and mutton could become chutney too — maas ki chutney from leftover mutton, fish from lunch becoming chutney for dinner.“There’s a saying in Marathi, ‘tondala lawaicha’, which means just enough to touch your mouth, and that’s exactly how much chutney one needed. But what it did was add a little punch to every meal,” says Medhora, founder of Charoli Foods, which began in 2015 as a pop-up serving the royal kitchens of Malwa and has since grown into a catering company specialising in royal cuisine.It was also, she believes, a quiet culinary strategy in a patriarchal household. “Men then would get upset if the food wasn’t up to the mark. But you can’t cook elaborate meals all the time! So what would the women do? Add a little chutney, and it would spice up the most boring meal, and nobody would complain.”Perhaps this is why chutney is so emotional. It is not merely what sits beside the food; it is a record of what was available, what was affordable, what grew in a particular season, what a grandmother knew to do with a peel, and what a mother could put together without measuring anything.Story continues below this adAlso Read | Move aside momos and chaat, Korean street food thelas are the new rage now Garhwali Til Chutney – Rushina 2aFor Zacharias, chutney is also a way of understanding a place. “Its ingredients and techniques can reveal a great deal about the local ecology, seasons, preservation practices and the knowledge held within home kitchens,” he says. At The Locavore, they featured Futkal Chutney from Jharkhand, made from tender wild fig buds gathered in a short season, boiled, sun-dried and later ground with roasted tomato, ginger, garlic and chilli. From Ladakh came Tangthur, made with buttermilk, seasonal greens and skotse, a wild Himalayan herb foraged in summer, pounded into cakes, dried and stored for winter. There was also Sukhti Chutney from Alibag, made with roasted and pounded dried jawla, garlic and chilli — particularly useful during the monsoon, when fresh seawater fish is less readily available. “Each of these is delicious, of course, but they also tell us how people respond to their surroundings and circumstances.”There is nutrition in that little spoonful too. Munshaw-Ghildiyal points out that chutney helped complete the shadrasa — the six tastes — even as the rest of the plate changed with the seasons.Much of this knowledge, she says, lived in the heads of women. Tanisha Phanbu, a home chef and proponent of Meghalaya cuisine, told Munshaw-Ghildiyal that after chutney was ground on the mawjingshoh, a ball of rice was rolled over the stone to collect every last bit of juice, flavour and spice. “People actually wait for those balls to come out,” says Munshaw-Ghildiyal.Each dash of a chutney brings back a memory. Munshaw-Ghildiyal’s husband’s grandmother, Mohini Raturi, made a til-tamatar wali chutney that was closer in texture to an aloo sabzi. She wrote down the recipe during one of her visits to Dehradun, not knowing that it would be the last time she would see her.Years later, she found the old notes, made the chutney and brought it home. Her husband Shekhar, who has co-published the book, finished it with six rotis that had originally been meant for dinner.Recently, when Raturi’s great-granddaughter got married in Delhi, Munshaw-Ghildiyal made the chutney again. Her daughters and grandchildren were there.“They were thrilled,” she says.The recipe in the book is credited to Mohini Raturi. And perhaps that is what chutney has always done best: carry something forward — a season, a place, a way of eating, a little thrift, a grandmother’s instinct, or simply the memory of a meal, one small spoonful at a time.