Skip to main content
Main

Walnut Ketchup

A fermented walnut condiment seasoned with salt, spices, and shallots.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 Ketchup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the walnut base

  1. Beat the walnuts into a very small consistency in a marble mortar.

  2. Add coarse sea salt and mix well.

  3. Place mixture in a clean earthen pan and stir two to three times daily for 10 to 14 days.

Strain and flavour

  1. Strain mixture through cloth, pressing dry.

  2. Boil liquid with mace, cloves, sliced nutmeg, and whole pepper.

  3. When nearly done, add shallots.

Bottle

  1. Bottle and cork tightly. Shake bottle when using the ketchup.

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. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  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. Clove + peppertop 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

Walnuts
Provide the main body and rich, earthy flavour of the ketchup once beaten and steeped.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the walnuts and helps preserve the mixture during the long standing period.
Shallots
Add a sharp, savoury onion-like note to the liquid when added near the end of boiling.

The step that matters

Stirring during the 10 to 14 day standing period. Regular stirring keeps the salted walnut mixture evenly mixed so it ferments and softens uniformly rather than developing spoiled patches on the surface or bottom.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Winter savoryfits better
  4. Macethe original

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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes