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Walnut Catsup

A fermented walnut sauce seasoned with spices and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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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

Cure the walnuts

  1. Prick young walnuts in several places and place them in a jar with ¼ cup of coarse sea salt for every 25 walnuts.

  2. Add enough water to cover the walnuts and let them sit for two weeks, stirring twice a day.

  3. Drain the liquid into a saucepan and cover the walnut shells with boiling vinegar to extract remaining juice.

  4. Crush the shells to a pulp and strain through a colander into the saucepan.

Season and simmer

  1. Add 1 ounce of black pepper, 1 ounce of ginger, ½ ounce of cloves, and ½ ounce of nutmeg to the mixture.

  2. Include a pinch of cayenne, 1 minced shallot for every 2 quarts, and a thimbleful of celery seed tied in a bag.

  3. Boil the mixture for 1 hour if you have a gallon.

Bottle

  1. Bottle the catsup when cool, adding an equal amount of spice to each bottle.

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. Nutmeg + shallottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,019 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Young walnuts
Provide the main body and flavour of the ketchup once cured and crushed.
Coarse sea salt
Draws out liquid and preserves the walnuts during the long curing period.
Boiling vinegar
Extracts remaining juice from the shells and adds acidity that helps preserve the ketchup.
Shallot
Adds a mild savoury, aromatic onion-like note to the sauce.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture for 1 hour. Long simmering concentrates the liquid and drives off harsh raw notes while blending the spices. Boiling time matters for flavour and keeping quality, so the hour should be followed closely for the batch size.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Lentilsfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

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

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