Skip to main content
Sauce

Walnut Catsup

A walnut-based sauce made with sea salt, gooseberry vinegar, and garlic.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Gooseberry and clove share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Walnut Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wipe the walnuts and slice them.

  2. Pound the walnuts with the salt in a mortar.

Steep and bottle

  1. Boil the vinegar and pour it over the walnuts.

  2. Let it stand for 2 days, then strain and bottle it.

  3. You can pour a quart more vinegar over the walnuts after the first is drawn off.

  4. Add a clove of garlic 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. Gooseberry + clovetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together15 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Walnut + clovetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  4. Vinegar + garlictop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,115 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Walnut + gooseberrytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the walnuts and helps preserve the mixture.
Gooseberry vinegar
Acts as the liquid base and sharp acidity that extracts flavour and preserves the ketchup.

The step that matters

Pounding the walnuts with the salt. Crushing the walnuts with salt breaks up their cell structure and draws out juices, so the flavour is released into the vinegar. Pounding too finely or too little can leave the result weak or gritty.

Swap the walnut

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against gooseberry, vinegar, clove, garlic. 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

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes