February 2015 – the heart thrills

MY SPIRIT HOUSE

Bangkok, 15 February, 2015

Anyone who has been in Thailand for more than half an hour begins to notice that every building, residential, commercial, governmental, whatever it happens to be, has one or more doll-like houses standing outside it in some corner of the property. To be very visible to one and all, they are set either on a tall pillar or on four somewhat smaller stilts. These, for instance, are the two which grace a corner of the parking lot at our apartment block.

And if, finally rendered curious by constantly coming across them, one decides to have a closer look, you will find that they hold little figurines – old people, dancers, horses, elephants, cars, sometimes a Buddha. This, for instance, is a catalogue of what the bigger of our apartment block’s two little houses contains.

They will often have votive offerings of food and drink as well as burning incense sticks set out in front of them along with fresh flowers

many of them will have flower garlands draped over them

and – at night – candles are set out or strings of lights turned on to light them up.

Quite charming. In fact, when my wife and I came to Bangkok for the first time some seven years ago, we were quite taken by these little houses and considered buying a DIY kit of one, to put up on the landing in front of the door of our then-apartment in Vienna, to house a small ivory Buddha which I had bought a few years before in Sri Lanka. But it was really too bulky, so we abandoned the idea.

But actually, why are these little houses there in the first place? I should have asked myself that the first time I saw them, before seriously considering putting one in front of my door.

A little bit of reading has informed me these houses are put up to propitiate the spirits of the land. This is a core belief of animism, that spirits reside in all the material manifestations of this world – the land, its streams, rivers, lakes, waterfalls, its trees and other plants, all animals, everything really, even man-made objects like bridges. Animism has deep, deep roots in Thailand – actually, in the whole of South-East Asia, from Myanmar down to Indonesia and across to the Philippines; the tradition of spirit houses, for instance, is found throughout the region apart possibly from the Philippines. The arrival of more rational, complex, sophisticated religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, or Christianity (or ethical systems like Confucianism in Vietnam), did not make the earlier animistic beliefs disappear, although I’m sure the leaders of these new religions tried hard to stamp them out (and at least in Thailand are still trying to, according to what I’ve read) or to absorb them (which is certainly what Buddhism has tried to do).

The sad thing is that these spirits are not nice beings. The purpose of those cute little houses is actually to make sure that the spirits of the land don’t get mad at you because you’re using their land and decide to burn down your house or give you a heart attack or bring Lord knows what other calamity down on your head. So in the house you’ll put figurines of servants to tend to the local land spirit’s every whim, you’ll put figurines of dancing girls (geishas might be a better descriptor) to keep him happy, you’ll put horses and elephants (and cars for the more sophisticated urbanized spirits) to make sure he can go for a ride whenever he gets bored of sitting at home and watching the dancing girls gyrate, you’ll give him food and drink to make sure he doesn’t go hungry … Reading all this, it occurs to me that these spirits are really just like the mafia in Sicily: if you don’t pay this man the requested pizzo, or protection money

then unfortunately this will happen to your shop.

So, these pretty little houses are actually the reflection of a deep existential fear, that all around you are naughty, nasty little spirits who will hurt you if you’re not nice to them. These reflections moved me to dip into “The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion” by the Scotsman James George Frazer.

The book, first published in 1890 and republished several times thereafter, attempts to define the shared elements of religious beliefs, discussing fertility rites, human sacrifice, the “dying god”, the “scapegoat”, and many other symbols and practices. Its thesis is that old religions were fertility cults that revolved around the worship and periodic sacrifice of a sacred king (among other places, his ideas take a central role in T.S. Elliot’s poem, “The Wasteland”, which I have had cause to mention 100 posts ago and which was the reason why I originally read “The Golden Bough”). I’m sure modern anthropologists would dispute Frazer’s basic thesis, but in writing the book Frazer collected accounts from around the world of magical, animistic beliefs, which are fascinating in themselves. Here are three excerpts which he cites from other sources on the belief in spirits in South-East Asia.

“Thus the life of the Thay seems regulated down to its smallest details by custom founded on his belief in the spirits. Spirits perpetually watch him, ready to punish for his negligences, and he is afraid. Fear is for him not only the beginning of wisdom, it is the whole of his wisdom. Love has only a very moderate place in it. Even the respect in which he holds his dead, and the honours which he pays them on various occasions, seem to be dominated by a superstitious fear. It seems that the sacrifices which he offers to them aim rather at averting from himself the evils which he dreads than at honouring worthily the memory of his deceased kinsfolk and at paying them the tribute of his affection and gratitude.”

“Independently of the demons who are in hell, the Siamese recognize another sort of devils diffused in the air: they call them phi; they are, they say, the demons who do harm to men and who appear sometimes in horrible shapes. They put down to these malign spirits all the calamities which happen in this world. If the mother has lost a child, it is the phi who has done the ill turn; if a sick man is given over, it is a phi that is at the bottom of it. To appease him, they invoke him and make him offerings which they hang in desert places.”

“The desire to propitiate the good spirits and exorcise the bad ones is the prevailing influence upon the life of the Laotians. With phis to the right of him, to the left of him, in front of him, behind him, all round him, his mind is haunted with a perpetual desire to make terms with them, and to ensure the assistance of the great Buddha, so that he may preserve both body and soul from the hands of the spirit.”

The first two excerpts, written in 1907 and 1831 respectively, come from books written by French missionaries, the third from a book written by an Englishman in 1884. The first two no doubt had religious axes to grind, wishing to show how the Thai (Siamese being the old name for the Thai) were poor, benighted folk in need of Christian redemption. But even accounting for a certain amount of exaggeration, the picture which these excerpts paint is bleak indeed: a constant, haunting fear at every step.

Of course, before we shake our heads and smile and take another sip of our coffee, we should remind ourselves (as Frazer reminds us in his book) that Europe, just to take my part of the world, was also the home of naughty, nasty little spirits. Anyone like me who had to suffer through Latin and Greek in their education will remember the Roman and Greek nymphs who haunted the sacred groves and streams, and who had to be propitiated. And what about all those leprechauns, and trolls, and sprites, and ogres, who populate children’s books and popular stories? Remember Rumplestiltskin, that nasty little imp who saves the miller’s daughter from the wrath of the king by spinning straw into gold for her, but on condition that she give him her first-born child?

Or that “shrewd and knavish sprite” Puck in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, who at the behest of his master Oberon, King of the fairies, wreaks mayhem in the Athenian woods?

Or the ogre in Jack and the Beanstalk, who on sensing that little Jack is hiding in his house, intones

“Fee-fi-fo-fum!
I smell the blood of an Englishman,
Be he alive, or be he dead,
I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.”

Even Tinkerbell in Disney’s sucrose version of “Peter Pan” is not a particularly nice person.

I suppose Christianity managed to reduce the strength of animistic beliefs in Europe – I won’t say stamp out, because otherwise we wouldn’t have the children’s stories – but only to replace them by another existential fear, that of suffering in hell for ever and ever.

Luckily, science has come to the rescue and driven out all the religious claptrap. There is no supernatural world, it tells us, only the natural world around us. And with that, all those spirits disappear in a flash.

But now that I know all this, would I still buy a spirit house kit to assemble on the landing in front of my apartment door in Europe? Do I want to be seen, if only to myself, to believe in naughty, nasty spirits? After giving some thought to the matter, I have concluded that yes, I would, but for a very different reason. One of the houses whose photo I give at the beginning of the post is the house of the ancestral spirits of the place, the spirits – or ghosts I suppose – of the people who lived there before you. In fact this house contains figurines of old people.

Unfortunately, these spirits also require propitiation in Thailand, since they too can turn nasty (jeez louise, what a world view!). But I would use the house differently. I would use it to house the memory of my parents and my wife’s parents. For my parents, I would have a very tall figurine stand in for my father and a very small figurine for my mother, for that indeed is how they were; one of my abiding memories of them is the two dancing together, he very tall, she very small, slowly circling the dance floor. For my wife’s parents, I would have a large figurine stand in for my mother-in-law, for she was indeed of a stout disposition. For my father-in-law, I’m not sure, I hardly knew him. I’ve mentioned before his fondness for wearing a Basque beret, so perhaps a figurine of a man with such a beret would do? But I would leave this for my wife to decide. And I would move the house into the apartment, so that their memory could be with us, rather than left out in the dark like the dog. I feel that this would be a better way of remembering them, of keeping their memory alive, than going on infrequent visits to the graveyard, and a useful complement to looking at old photos and reminiscing. And I would hope that one day my children would also have a spirit house to which they could add little figurines of us once that day arrives. As it surely will.

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Spirit houses: my pictures
Mafia man: https://solo3d.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/mafia-man-by-siamak-roshani-1.jpg (in https://solo3d.wordpress.com/scenes/portraits/mafia-man/)
Burning shop: http://www.newsbiscuit.com/images/845.jpg (in http://www.newsbiscuit.com/2007/09/05/fire-brigade-turned-up-late-to-burning-pizza-shop-as-satirical-statement/)
“The Golden Bough” cover: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KNKUm2qVFeo/URmCSeqWMuI/AAAAAAAAMKQ/YNPwXF5oY7s/s1600/The_Golden_Bough.jpg (in http://38is.blogspot.com/2013_02_01_archive.html)
Rumplestitskin: http://www.artsycraftsy.com/goble/wg_rumplestiltskin.jpg (in http://www.artsycraftsy.com/goble/goble_rumplestiltskin.html)
Puck: http://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large/a-midsummer-nights-dream-ht-green.jpg (in http://fineartamerica.com/featured/a-midsummer-nights-dream-ht-green.html)
Ogre in Jack and the Beanstalk: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Jack_and_the_Beanstalk_Giant_-_Project_Gutenberg_eText_17034.jpg (in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_and_the_Beanstalk)
Tinkerbell: http://cdn.hellogiggles.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/22/Walt-Disney-Screencaps-Peter-Pan-Wendy-Darling-Tinker-Bell-walt-disney-characters-34385876-4326-3237.jpg (in http://hellogiggles.com/real-life-disney-romance/walt-disney-screencaps-peter-pan-wendy-darling-tinker-bell-walt-disney-characters-34385876-4326-3237)
Hell: https://36.media.tumblr.com/20721aba85e8475adb529816d4e40a10/tumblr_n1kmegRkqx1qm5yeno1_500.jpg (in https://www.tumblr.com/search/art%20history%20hell)

SALT AND SWEET

Bangkok, 5 February, 2015

A few weeks ago, I visited a couple of electric arc furnaces which were recycling scrap steel. It was a very interesting visit, the first time I had seen this type of furnace in action.

They are a nice example of a vital step in what the Chinese call a “circular economy”, an economy in which the materials we use do not simply get thrown away after we’ve finished with them, but are collected, recovered, and reused.

But actually, what I want to focus on in this post is the dinner we were served during the visit, or rather on one course of that dinner. I should explain that since these furnaces work on electricity and since electricity is expensive in Thailand during the day, the furnaces are run at night. So the visit of the furnaces started at 8 o’clock in the evening, and the first company we visited kindly offered us dinner to fortify us for the hot and dusty visit which awaited us. Since this was a Chinese-owned company, we were served a Chinese-style dinner which, after my five years spent in China, brought a nostalgic mist to my eye. As is usual in China, the dinner ended with fresh fruit. But this fruit course had an interesting twist. We were served fresh pineapple with a soy sauce dip. Soy sauce! That is not something I had ever thought of combining with pineapple. But actually it was delicious.

This is the only photo I could find on the (English-language) web which in any way resembled what we found before us at dessert time, but even this is for a recipe where the pineapple is fried, which explains the presence in the photo of the coriander (to be used as a final garnish). I take this lack of photos to be an indicator that I may be one of the few in the English-speaking world who has tried this particular combination of sweet and salt. But readers are free to disabuse me of my belief.

In any event, as I let my taste buds deal with this interesting sweet-salt combination, I remembered a conversation we had had around the Christmas lunch table about precisely this issue: the mixing of salt and sweet. Our son had maintained that it was not natural to mix sweet and salt, and more generally that different flavours should be kept separate. Our daughter maintained that there were many dishes where salt and sweet were combined, which suggested that actually it was quite natural to mix sweet and salt. I was torn. As my long-suffering wife knows only too well, I object to mixing things on my plate: the vegetables are to be kept neatly separated from the meat and from each other, the dressing from the salad should not be allowed to leak over to the meat, etc. So on these grounds, I also feel that sweet and salt should not mix. Yet I have to acknowledge that there are dishes where the sweet and salt combination is exceedingly pleasing. After the pineapple and soy sauce dip experience, I resolved to do some research (a.k.a. web browsing) on the topic.

I’ve now done the research and am ready to report back, although I must confess to not having much to report. All agree that “common sense” suggests that salt and sweet do not mix, yet all agree that actually many of us do like to mix the two. Why is this? As far as I can make out, no-one has really figured it out. One possible answer is biochemical. The sodium ions of salt somehow enhance all taste buds: “there’s evidence that applying a sodium-channel blocker (TTX) can dramatically inhibit the activity of all taste receptors, suggesting that sodium plays a key role in the cellular detection of every taste (and not just the taste of salty things) … This would explain why food without any salt is so hopelessly boring: it might be literally harder for our various taste receptors to get excited.” So mixing salt with sweet enhances sweet because of a biochemical pathway we are born with. Just to make the whole discussion sound even more scientific, I throw in here a close-up of a taste bud on a tongue, which is what sodium ions seem to be enhancing.

But why would we have evolved to have that biochemical pathway? One possible answer is that because we humans are omnivores, we’re wired to desire many different foods and tastes. It’s bad for us to eat just one thing, so our sense of taste has evolved to give us greater gratification if we mix tastes. My wife will be very pleased to hear that there is a scientific underpinning to her insistence on mixing foods and tastes.

Let me celebrate this new understanding on my part of my biological processes by sharing with readers some of the wonderful sweet-salt dishes which I have stumbled across in my life. Where to start? Well, at the beginning, I guess, with the first such dish I ever remember trying, lamb with mint sauce. My English grandmother had taken me to visit an uncle and aunt and assorted cousins, and my aunt served us lamb with mint sauce for lunch.

She served it with two veg, as is de rigeur for any English meat dish. In this case, I remember distinctly that the veg in question were that most English of combinations, peas and potatoes (she also made a magnificent apple crumble, by the way; no apple crumble I have ever eaten since has tasted so good).

Mint sauce is really easy to make, by the way, about as easy as lamb chops. I give an executive-summary recipe at the end of the post for those readers who are interested. What I think is important to point out here is that the recipe calls for a mix of sugar and vinegar. In my humble opinion the best combination is actually sweet, salt, and acid or tartness. To my mind, that’s what made the pineapple and soy sauce so good, the fact that the pineapple is also tart. Dragon fruit, a much milder fruit, was being served along with the pineapple. When I asked if that too should be dipped in the soy sauce, our hosts pursed their lips and gave it as their considered opinion that it wouldn’t work.

Lamb with mint sauce is incredibly English (and I mean English. I don’t think the Scots or the Welsh eat it). It is so English that the French made fun of Les Anglais because of it – the French consider the use of mint sauce to be beyond the cooking pale. Our friends Goscinny and Uderzo, who wrote the Asterix and Obelix stories, had mint sauce play a major role in our heroes’ adventures in Britain, with the governor of province at one point shouting that if his men did not find the pair (who had just disappeared from prison) he would have his commanders boiled and served with mint sauce to the lions. To which the commanders commented how horrible that would be – for the lions.

The French loved it, lapping up the fun being poked at English cuisine. But I will ignore the smirking French and concentrate on another great example of English cuisine which is also a sweet-salt dish, roast pork and apple sauce. I first had this delicious dish as a boy scout. It was summer, the end of the school year, that time in the calendar when England can often be bathed in golden light rather than be grey and sodden. For our last outing of the year, the scout master had the brilliant idea of buying a whole pig and roasting it on a spit in the woods. I have this crystal clear memory of sitting around the spit, listening to the fat crackle, breathing in the smell of cooking meat, watching the scout master sharpen the large carving knife, while the sunlight dappled the ground all around us. It’s the closest I have ever felt to being a Cro-Magnon man.

And then there was the discovery of the exquisite taste of roast pork and apple sauce, a large dollop of which was dumped onto our metal field plates along with a big slab of pork meat and crackling.

Those readers interested in knowing how to make this sauce should scroll down to the end of the post. I just want to note that cooking apples should be used. They are tarter than eating apples. It’s the tartness thing again. One can also add lemon zest, presumably to add yet more tartness.

Of course, the English do not have a monopoly in Europe on sweet-salt dishes. Allow me to introduce here a dish I discovered and came to love when we moved to Vienna: Tafelspitz. There is a venerable ritual to cooking Tafelspitz, but when you reduce it to its essentials it is beef meat (topside or top round) boiled slowly over many hours with a medley of root vegetables – carrot, celeriac, parsnip and the like – and a piece of marrow bone. It is normally served like this:

You can start with a cup of the broth which is engendered by the boiling of the meat, just to whet your appetite. You can then turn your attention to the meat proper, which you will eat with the vegetables, possibly some fried grated potatoes, and – to spice up what is otherwise a rather bland dish – two types of sauce, a cream-based chive sauce and apple-horseradish sauce.

My earnest suggestion is that you ignore the chive sauce in the front of the photo and go with the apple-horseradish sauce behind it. It is just a variant of the apple sauce I described earlier; you simply add grated horseradish. If you make this sauce at home, my further suggestion is to be generous with the amount of horseradish you add. The best Tafelspitz I ever had was served with an apple-horseradish sauce that made my eyes water slightly. I don’t want to sound like a broken record, endlessly repeating myself, but tartness really helps appreciation of the sweet-salt taste.

Both the French and the Italians have a similar dish of boiled meat, pot-au-feu in the first case and bollito misto in the second. My French grandmother made an excellent pot-au-feu and I am very fond of it, but since it is normally eaten with mustard I will drop it from this discussion. We shall focus instead on bollito misto, a dish which is very popular in northern Italy and (as the name suggests) consists of a variety of boiled meats: cuts of beef and veal, cotechino (a pork-based sausage), and sections of hen or capon.

My wife reminisces from time to time that her father was very fond of bollito misto, eating it like most northern Italians do with a sauce called mostarda – actually, mostarda di Cremona. In a country known for the fierce independence of its cities, it will come as no surprise to the readers that probably every city in northern Italy has its own variety of mostarda. Despite its name, the sauce has only a little to do with mustard. It is really a mix of candied fruit which is given a kick by the addition of mustard powder (that tartness thing again…). Those slices of fruit in the photo above are the mostarda, but I give here a more direct picture.

My wife confesses to never having liked mostarda; she can’t even stand the smell. Personally, I have never tried it, but a number of sites do support my wife’s assertion, mentioning that the taste of mostarda is an “acquired taste”. This is normally code for saying that something tastes revolting the first several/many times you try it. In any event, if my wife says it’s not nice, then that’s good enough for me! No spoonful of it shall ever pass my lips. For those readers who will ignore these warnings and wish to try it, though, I give a brief recipe at the end of the post.

I feel that I cannot move away from mostarda without mentioning the somewhat similar chutney sauce one finds in the UK, or at least one found when I was a boy. Although “chutney” as a word has Indian roots, what I ate as a boy was several removes from things Indian. The most popular brand back then was a mango chutney which went by the name of Major Grey’s Chutney and was sold by Crosse & Blackwell. The story went that a certain Major Grey, a British officer in India, had surveyed the local Indian chutneys and then invented his own, more British, chutney, which he proceeded to bring back to the motherland when he retired, to remind him of the Good Old Days. When I was a boy I rather imagined this Major Grey to look like this

fighting heroically against savage natives on the Northwest frontier and getting a VC for his –quite literal – pains. But alas! this appears to be pure legend. It seems that something similar to mostarda, some sort of fruit conserve, existed already in the UK and the Brits in India took the idea with them and adapted it to local ingredients. So what this chutney will usually have as ingredients is mangoes, raisins, vinegar, onions, sugar, and spices. Crosse & Blackwell also include lime juice and tamarind juice. As you can imagine from the ingredients, this chutney is both sweet and tart. Again, for heroic readers who want to make this sauce from scratch, scroll to the end of the post.

I haven’t eaten this kind of chutney in many decades, but when I was young my favourite way of eating it was with slices of cold meat (the chutney is in the round bowl to the left of the photo below).

This was an especially popular dish in pubs, where this photo was taken. Sitting here in Thailand, I feel a sudden nostalgia for the English country pubs whose bars I propped up in my youth, so I am moved to throw in a photo of a nice country pub.

Like Superman, I now vault over to the US and alight somewhere in the open ranges of the Midwest, for no better reason than having this feeling that my next salt-sweet sauce – barbecue sauce – was invented around there somewhere. That being said, my wife and I didn’t try it there. We were just discussing this point and we reckon that it was somewhere between Boston and Washington in the early 1980s. Wherever it was, we stared open-mouthed at these large racks of ribs smothered in this dark reddish brown sauce.

But very soon we were closing our mouths over those ribs. Ah, that sauce! … But I should say: those sauces. In this little research I’ve done I have discovered that there are dozens of different barbecue sauces. I thought the Italian quarrels about where the best mostarda is made were fierce, but boy! the arguments about what place in the US makes the best barbecue sauce are right up there. I’m going to keep my head low without backing any particular sauce. I’m merely going to say that wherever the sauces are made they all seem to have sugar (preferably brown), tomato ketchup, vinegar, and some salt, to which various spices are added in varying levels and in different combinations (Worcestershire sauce, pepper, paprika, mustard, chili, cayenne, and on and on). That combination of sweet and tart again, to challenge the salt of the meat. Readers can look at the end of a post for condensed recipe of an excellent sauce from Kansas City (but don’t tell anyone I said it).

Deary me, I seem to have gone on for quite a while here, and I’m sure I haven’t covered one-hundredth of the sweet-salt dishes enjoyed around the world. On top of it, I’ve only mentioned meat dishes; it makes me sound a total carnivore, red in tooth and claw. But there was that fish dish in Shanghai … and there are all those sweet salad sauces to pour on vegetables … But I have to stop. I’ll just add two final combinations of salt and sweet which show that meat (or fish) is not the only food the delight of which is heightened by the salt-sweet experience: one which probably every person on the planet has enjoyed by now, what with the prevalence of fast food joints, french fries and ketchup

and one which I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, chocolate and French baguette

Mmm, so good!

So give your taste buds a whirl and douse them with sugar and salt – and a dash of vinegar, or horseradish, or something tart. Enjoy!

-o0o-

Mint sauce: Strip the leaves off a bunch of mint, sprinkle them with a pinch of salt, and chop finely. Place the result in a bowl, add 1 level tablespoon of caster sugar and pour over the mix 4 tablespoons of boiling water. Stir and leave to cool. Stir in 4 tablespoons of vinegar. Add more water or vinegar to suit your taste.

Apple sauce: Take a number of cooking apples, peel them, core them, and chop them up. Put the apples in a saucepan and add water. Once can also add lemon zest. Cover and cook over a low heat until the apples have gone soft and mushy. At which point take off the heat and beat in a knob of butter and a teaspoon of sugar. Cool.

Mostarda di Cremona: Begin by washing the various fruit: pears, quinces, cherries, apricots, figs, and peaches (although I’m sure you can vary the fruit as you wish). Cut the apricots and peaches into halves or quarters (depending on their size) and remove their stones, peel. Core and quarter the pears and quinces. Dry all the fruit after preparation. Add the sugar – a lot of sugar! half a kilo for every kilo of fruit, more if you want your mostarda sweet (but for reasons suggested above, I would go easy on the sweetness and maybe go heavier on the mustard powder). Pour some squeezed orange juice over it. Let the whole rest for 24 hours, gently turning the pieces a couple of times. By the end of this time the sugar will have dissolved. Drain the fruit well – without losing the syrup! Bring the syrup slowly to a boil, and let it boil gently until its volume is reduced by half. Pour the remaining syrup back over the fruit. The sugar in the now-concentrated syrup will extract more moisture from the fruit, which will begin to shrink and firm up. Concentrate the syrup again and steep the fruit in it overnight again. Dissolve several tablespoons of mustard powder in some white wine vinegar. Bring the mixture gently to a boil and let it bubble for a few minutes. In the meantime, drain the fruit again, and concentrate the syrup again. Put the candied fruit into jars, add the mustard powder infusion, and then add the hot syrup. The amount of infusion you add will determine of course how much of a kick your mostarda will have. Cover the jars and put them on a cool dark shelf. The mostarda will be ready to eat in two weeks’ time.

Major Grey’s chutney: (this is one of many recipes for this kind of chutney) Combine 4 cups of 5-6 medium-sized chopped mangoes, 1 cup of brown sugar, half a cup of molasses, 1 cup of vinegar, 1 cup of coarsely chopped onions, three-quarters of a cup of golden raisins, half a cup of seeded and chopped limes, half a cup of peeled, seeded and chopped orange, a quarter of a cup of peeled, seeded and chopped lemon, and finally a bunch of spices: half a cup of grated ginger root , 3 cloves of minced garlic, 1 tablespoon of mustard seed, 1 tablespoon of dried red pepper flakes. Cook for about 30 minutes, stirring often. Add 2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh cilantro, 1 teaspoon of ground cinnamon, a quarter of a teaspoon of ground cloves, a quarter of a teaspoon of ground allspice. Cook for another 10 minutes or so, until chutney starts to thicken. Ladle chutney into a jar and close it air-tight.

Barbecue sauce: (from Kansas City) In a saucepan over medium heat, stir together ½ cup of ketchup, 2 tablespoons of brown sugar, 1 tablespoon of cider vinegar, 2 tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce, ¼ teaspoon of salt, ¼ teaspoon of mustard powder, 1 teaspoon of garlic powder, and a dash of hot pepper sauce. Bring to a simmer, then remove from heat and allow to cool.

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