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Irish Walnut Ketchup
Extract the inner white part of some green walnuts, and, after pounding them thoroughly, strain off the juice to make it clear, let it stand for twelve hours, and strain again. Add to each pint of juice a large onion, two ounces of horse-radish, sliced, half an ounce of shallots, a clove of garlic, half a pint of vinegar, and half a pound of anchovies. These ingredients being well mixed, boil for two hours. When cold, strain the liquor until quite clear, then add to each pint of the ketchup half an ounce of spice (mace, cloves, nutmeg, and whole black pepper in equal quantities), two wine-glassfuls of port, and a quarter of a glass of soy. Boil again for three-quarters of an hour, but do not strain the liquor, as the spices must be distributed in the several bottles in which it is placed. The saucepan must always be kept closely covered, or the delicious aromatic flavour will evaporate. Pour the ketchup into a jar, and cover till cold, when it can be poured into bottles, but the greatest attention must be paid to their being clean and dry. Seal the corks. Probable cost, 1s. per pint.
A pre-tomato ketchup, and one that stands or falls on getting the walnuts at the right stage. Everything else is a straightforward vinegar-and-anchovy reduction.
- Green walnuts, and whenThese are unripe walnuts picked in June or early July, while a needle or pin will still pass cleanly through the whole nut. Once the inner shell begins to harden — usually by mid-July — there is no soft white kernel to pound and the recipe cannot be made.
- "The inner white part"The soft, undeveloped kernel inside the green husk, not the husk itself. Cassell's gives no weight and no yield can be inferred from the text; pound them in batches so nothing oxidises waiting.
- Wear glovesGreen walnut husks are loaded with juglone, which stains skin brown-black for a week and will not wash out of a wooden board or a cotton apron. Nitrile gloves and a stainless or glass bowl throughout.
- A wine-glassfulIn Victorian cookery books this is about 2 fl oz, so two wine-glassfuls of port is a scant half cup and a quarter glass of soy is about a tablespoon. "Soy" here means soy sauce, then sold in England as a bottled table condiment.
- The anchoviesHalf a pound of salted anchovies, sold whole in brine or packed in salt, not oil-packed fillets. They dissolve entirely during the two-hour boil and supply most of the salt in the finished sauce; if you substitute oil-packed fillets, drain and blot them first.
- Half an ounce of spiceDivided equally between blade mace, whole cloves, nutmeg and black peppercorns; at whole-spice volumes that is roughly a teaspoon of each, though weigh rather than measure if you can. Keep them whole — the liquor is deliberately not strained after the final three-quarter-hour boil so the spices can be divided between the bottles.
- Keep it coveredThe instruction about the lid is not decoration. Mace, cloves and nutmeg give up their aromatics to steam, and an uncovered two-and-three-quarter-hour reduction will leave you with vinegar and fish.
- Bottling and keepingSealed corks in a cool larder was the Victorian standard, but this is not a validated preserving method. Fill hot into clean jars, cool, and keep it refrigerated; the vinegar and salt make it long-lived there, and the flavour improves over several months. A pint bottles into roughly four small dressing bottles.
- How to use itA teaspoon or two at a time, stirred into gravies, brown sauces, beef stews and devilled dishes, or shaken over grilled meat. It is dark, salty and pungent rather than sweet, and nothing like tomato ketchup in use.
Walnut ketchup belongs to the older meaning of the word: before tomatoes took it over, a "ketchup" or "catsup" in Britain was any thin, dark, salty bottled sauce used to season made dishes, the name generally traced to a Hokkien or Malay term for a fermented fish brine that English traders encountered in Southeast Asia. Mushroom and walnut were the two dominant British versions through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and both leaned on anchovies for the savoury depth the original fish sauces had provided. Why versions like this one carry the "Irish" label is unclear. Cassell's, compiled in the 1870s for households that made their own condiments by the gallon, prints several rival walnut ketchups side by side and quotes a probable cost for each, a reminder that a shilling a pint was measured against the price of the bottled sauces then appearing in shops.