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Walnut Catsup

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 the walnuts in salt and water for four days.

  2. Pound the walnuts in a marble mortar.

  3. Add 1 quart of vinegar for every dozen walnuts and stir daily for a week.

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

Season and bottle

  1. Add 1 teaspoon of pounded cloves, 1 teaspoon of mace, 1 teaspoon of grated nutmeg, and a small piece of whole pepper to the juice.

  2. Boil the mixture for about 30 minutes.

  3. Bottle the catsup, corking each bottle tightly and sealing 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 base and body of the ketchup once pounded and steeped.
Vinegar
Acts as the preserving liquid and extracts flavour from the pounded walnuts over the week.
Salt
Draws moisture from the walnuts and helps preserve the mixture.

The step that matters

Soak the walnuts in salt and water for four days. The salt brine softens the walnuts and draws out moisture and bitterness before pounding. Too short a soak leaves the walnuts firm and harsh, so the flavour does not develop well.

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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