Skip to main content
Sauce

Walnut Catsup

A walnut-based sauce made by steeping walnuts, extracting juice, and simmering with vinegar and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Walnut Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the walnuts

  1. Prick the walnuts with a pin and layer them in an unglazed jar with a light sprinkling of salt.

  2. Pound the walnuts lightly with a piece of wood to bruise them.

  3. Let the mixture stand for ten days, stirring daily.

Make the ketchup

  1. Strain the juice into a saucepan.

  2. Cover the walnut shells with boiling vinegar, crush to a pulp, and strain through a colander into the saucepan.

  3. Add spices: 1 ounce each of black pepper and ginger, ½ ounce each of cloves and nutmeg, a pinch of cayenne, a bag of celery seed, and 1 minced onion for every 2 quarts.

  4. Boil the mixture for one hour for each gallon.

Bottle and seal

  1. Bottle the catsup when cold, dividing the spices equally among the bottles.

  2. Cork and seal the bottles.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Walnut + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Ginger + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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 main body and flavour of the ketchup as they break down over the long steeping.
Boiling vinegar
Extracts flavour from the walnut shells and adds sharp acidity that helps preserve the ketchup.
Coarse sea salt
Draws juice out of the walnuts and helps preserve the mixture during the ten-day standing.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture for one hour for each gallon. Boiling concentrates the flavour and helps reduce the risk of spoilage, so the time should match the batch size rather than be cut short.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, vinegar, pepper, ginger, clove, nutmeg, celery. 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.

You might also like

Ginger SauceGinger Sauce12 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes