Pa Hill Lemon Chutney product reviews

When I was growing up, takeaways meant fish and chips. Sometimes the fish might be a different variety, and sometimes the chips might vary in size or grease quotient, but they were still the staple special-treat meal - freshly cooked to order and served in newspaper. They were the only meal to have when travelling or spending time at the beach. (Unless you had a pie for a change, of course!) Salt was the required seasoning in those days, but as time went on, people realised that salt in quantity is not especially good for you and started using other foods for flavouring. Top of the list was a lemon, cut into slices and squeezed over the meal.

Enter lemon chutney - a new take on an old idea. We were at the beach for the afternoon, arriving with a hot parcel of food (in pristine newsprint minus the black lettering). We had specified that we wanted no salt added because we were going to try out the lemon chutney instead. There was a temporary setback as we could not get the lid to budge no matter how hard we tried. Finally, we got a screwdriver out of the car boot and managed to lever it off. All four of us (two adults and two children) were extremely hungry and ready to demolish everything in sight, including the entire jar of chutney.

I put a little on one piece of fish first and then asked everyone to try it. We were not sure whether the children (aged seven and eight) would like it. Miss Seven gave it the thumbs up and said she liked the lemon flavour. She likes pickled onions too so I guess that was not unexpected after all. Mr Eight said it was "ok" but he was just as happy to eat his fish as it was. As for the adults, both of us enjoyed it and agreed that it was a great way to carry flavourings on a picnic. The jar is nicely compact and fitted into my friend's picnic basket neatly.

We were both impressed that the list of ingredients included only natural foodstuffs, and that sugar was way down the list. The last time we had fish and chips on the beach we had added tartare sauce, but that had large amounts of sugar and artificial preservatives. And it was nowhere near as tasty. I think this product would go well with any fish meal, especially with fatty fishes like mackerel or salmon, and would also be good with ham which tends to be rich. I intend to try it on a ham sandwich at some stage.