Skip to main content
Sauce

Walnut Catsup

A walnut-based sauce made with anchovies, eschalots, spices, and vinegar, then aged for a year.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the gills from the walnuts and place them in a pot.

  2. Add the anchovies, eschalots, black pepper, cloves, nutmeg, and mace.

Cook and bottle

  1. Pour in the vinegar and bring the mixture to a boil.

  2. Boil for 30 minutes, then let it cool.

  3. Strain the mixture and bottle it.

Age

  1. Let it sit for a year before using.

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. Nutmeg + macetop 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. Shallot + nutmegtop 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

Young walnuts
Provide the main body and bitter, earthy flavor that defines the ketchup.
Anchovies
Add savory depth, umami, and a salty backbone that rounds out the spices.
Eschalots
Contribute mild sweetness and aromatic onion-like flavor to the base.
Vinegar
Acts as the preserving liquid and provides acidity that extracts and balances the flavors.

The step that matters

Boiling the mixture. The boil must be sustained long enough to extract flavor from the walnuts and spices and to help the acidic liquid preserve the ketchup. Too brief a boil leaves the mixture underdeveloped and less stable for long storage.

Swap the mace

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

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

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