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Sauce

Walnut Catsup

A fermented walnut sauce made with vinegar, spices, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 the walnuts

  1. Soak walnuts in salt and water for 4 days.

  2. Pound walnuts in a marble mortar.

  3. Add 1 quart of vinegar to the walnuts and stir daily for 1 week.

  4. Press the mixture through a bag to extract the juice.

Make the ketchup

  1. In a pot, combine the juice with cloves, mace, nutmeg, and whole pepper.

  2. Boil the mixture for 30 minutes.

Bottle and seal

  1. Bottle the catsup, cork tightly, and seal the corks.

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. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Clove + macetop 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

Walnuts
Provide the main flavour and body of the ketchup as they break down into the liquid.
Vinegar
Acts as the preserving liquid and adds sharp acidity that balances the rich nut flavour.
Sea salt
Draws moisture out of the walnuts and helps preserve the mixture during soaking.
Cloves
Add warm, aromatic spice flavour to the finished ketchup.

The step that matters

Boiling the mixture. Boiling after the juice is extracted and spiced heats the liquid to kill microbes and help the ketchup keep longer in sealed bottles. Skipping or shortening it leaves a higher spoilage risk.

Swap the mace

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

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

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