Beet Chutney

A few weeks ago I was singing the praises of Darina Allen's Forgotten Skills, but today I'm just scratching my head and wondering which skills Allen decided to leave out of her book and why.  The best thing about the book isn't actually that it teaches you forgotten skills, but that it makes you want to learn them and inspires you with its beautiful pictures of happy livestock and its effortless-seeming recipes.  However, Allen sometimes presumes a level of kitchen knowledge that I simply don't possess.  Take tonight's adventure as an example:  The beet chutney recipe was straightforward.  The peeling and chopping was kind of laborious, but then I watched a movie and worked while the chutney cooked, so it didn't feel too time consuming.  The resulting chutney was delicious.  However, as I was looking back over the recipe to figure out what I was supposed to do with a huge vat of delicious chutney, I realized that Allen was surprisingly vague about how to preserve it.  She mentioned sterilizing the jars - which I had already done (being a seasoned canner after my one batch of tomatoes) - but very little else.  She also failed to mention in the recipe that the salt called for was pickling salt.  I only noticed later that she mentioned the pickling salt at the beginning of the section on chutneys (which I had read previously and completely forgotten, of course).  In some ways I admire Allen's laid back, anyone can do it attitude.  It's an attitude that I possess in spades, and I wish that more accomplished people would act like anyone could do what they do.  But in a cookbook, especially one marketed to idiots (i.e. people under 40 who have never cooked anything from scratch), I think that a more direct, even lecturing, tone is required.  I have no idea whether my chutney will last more than a week or two.  While I welcome the experiment, I have 3 hours of my weekend and about $15 worth of food in those jars, and I would have liked to have been able to keep them for a while, maybe even give them as Christmas presents.  As it is, my friends and I will be eating really fantastic beet chutney with fresh baked bread and the Special Reserve Vintage White Extra Sharp Tillamook Cheddar I picked up at the Tillamook Cheese Factory today on my way home from the coast.  In fact, we'll probably be eating that every day for the foreseeable future, and I guess that's okay with me.