Skip to main content
Sauce

Another Good Receipt for Walnut Catsup

A fermented walnut sauce made with eschalots, garlic, sea salt, vinegar, anchovies, pepper, cloves, and mace.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Another Good Receipt for Walnut Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the walnuts

  1. Bruise the walnuts in a large marble mortar until broken.

  2. Place the walnuts in a stone jar with the sliced eschalots, garlic, salt, and vinegar.

Steep and strain

  1. Let the mixture stand for 10 days.

  2. Stir it morning and night.

  3. Strain the liquid.

Boil and bottle

  1. Boil it for 30 minutes with anchovies, black pepper, cloves, and mace.

  2. Skim the mixture.

  3. Strain it again.

  4. Let it cool.

  5. Pour the liquid into small dry bottles, avoiding sediment.

  6. Cork the bottles securely.

  7. Store them in a dry place.

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Garlic + peppertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Garlic + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Green walnuts
Provide the bulk of the flavour and a dark, bitter, tannin-rich character.
Vinegar
Acts as the preserving liquid and extracts flavour from the walnuts and aromatics.
Salt
Draws out liquid and helps preserve the mixture during the long standing period.
Anchovies
Add savoury depth, melting into the liquid to build umami.
Eschalots
Contribute sharp, aromatic sweetness that mellows during standing.
Black pepper
Adds warm, pungent spice that gives the ketchup its bite.

The step that matters

Skim the mixture after boiling. Boiling with the anchovies and spices releases foam and impurities that rise to the surface. Skimming removes them so the finished liquid is clear and clean-tasting, and straining again removes fine solids that would otherwise cloud it and form sediment in the bottles.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, 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.

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