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Sauce

Walnut Catsup

A fermented walnut-based condiment made by pickling walnuts, extracting juice, and simmering with spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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

Pickle the walnuts

  1. Prick the green walnuts in several places and place them in a jar with a generous amount of coarse sea salt and enough water to cover them.

  2. Let the walnuts sit for several days, then break them with a mallet and let them pickle for two weeks.

  3. Pour off 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.

Make the catsup

  1. For every quart of liquid, add 1 ounce of black pepper, 1 ounce of ginger, ½ ounce of cloves, and ½ ounce of nutmeg, all pounded fine.

  2. Add 1 minced shallot for every 2 quarts, a pinch of Cayenne pepper, and a thimbleful of celery seed tied in a bag for every 2 quarts.

  3. Boil all ingredients together for 1 hour.

  4. Let the mixture cool, then bottle it, ensuring to add an equal quantity of spices 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

Green walnuts
Provide the bitter, astringent juice that forms the base of the catsup.
Boiling vinegar
Extracts the remaining juice from the shells and adds sharp acidity.
Shallots
Add a mild savory onion flavor to the catsup.
Black pepper
Adds sharp, pungent heat and aroma to the liquid.
Ginger
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavor.
Cloves
Add strong, warm aromatic flavor.

The step that matters

Boil all ingredients together for 1 hour. Prolonged boiling concentrates the liquid and blends the spices into it, while the vinegar's acidity helps preserve the catsup. Boiling too briefly leaves the spices raw and the flavor unbalanced.

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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