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Sauce

Walnut Catsup

A walnut-based sauce made by soaking walnuts, then boiling with vinegar and seasoning with salt, pepper, and ginger.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Walnut and ginger work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 737 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Walnut Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the walnuts

  1. Prick the walnuts.

  2. Place them in a jar with enough water to cover them.

  3. Add a handful of coarse sea salt for every 25 walnuts.

  4. Stir twice a day for 14 days.

Make the ketchup

  1. Drain the liquid into a kettle.

  2. Cover the walnuts with boiling vinegar.

  3. Crush the walnuts to a pulp.

  4. Strain the pulp through a colander into the juice.

  5. For every quart of juice, add 2 ounces each of white pepper and ginger.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Walnut + gingertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together737 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. White pepper + gingertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together388 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Vinegar + gingertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,126 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  4. Vinegar + white peppertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Walnut + vinegartop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,769 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Young, tender walnuts
Provide the base flavour and dark body of the ketchup as they steep and break down.
Coarse sea salt
Draws out liquid and preserves the walnuts during the long steeping period.
Boiling vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and helps preserve the ketchup.
White pepper
Adds warm, sharp aroma and gentle heat to the finished ketchup.
Ginger
Adds aromatic, spicy warmth that rounds out the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir twice a day for 14 days. Regular stirring keeps the walnuts evenly in contact with the salty liquid, so they soften and release flavour uniformly instead of spoiling or steeping unevenly at the surface.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (walnut, vinegar, ginger):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Clovefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, vinegar, ginger. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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