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Sauce

Walnut Ketchup

A fermented walnut condiment made with vinegar, shallots, garlic, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,000 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Walnut Ketchup

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the walnuts

  1. Remove the gills from the walnuts and crush them in a large mortar until thoroughly broken.

Steep

  1. Place the crushed walnuts in a jar with the shallots, garlic, vinegar, and coarse sea salt.

  2. Let the mixture stand for 14 days, stirring twice daily.

Boil and bottle

  1. Strain off the liquid and pour it into a saucepan with the anchovies, whole pepper, cloves, and mace.

  2. Boil the mixture, skimming off any foam.

  3. Strain again and, when cool, pour into small bottles, sealing them tightly.

  4. Store in a dry place. The sediment can be used to flavor sauces.

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. Shallot + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,000 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Shallot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Walnut + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together440 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Green walnuts
Provide the main bitter, astringent flavour that defines the ketchup.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out and preserves the mixture during the long steep.
Vinegar
Acts as the preserving liquid and extracts flavour from the walnuts and aromatics.
Anchovies
Add a savoury, umami depth to the finished sauce.
Shallots
Contribute pungent, savoury aromatic flavour to the steeping liquid.

The step that matters

Sealing and storing after boiling. Bottling while the liquid is still warm, or sealing loosely, can allow spoilage. Cooling fully before tight sealing and storing in a dry place helps keep the ketchup stable over time.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

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