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Walnut Ketchup
Take a hundred young green walnuts, and pound them until well bruised. Put them in a jar with half a pound of chopped shallots, two quarts of vinegar, a head or two of garlic, and half a pound of salt, and stir every day for ten days. Then strain the liqour, and boil it with two ounces of anchovies, two ounces of whole pepper, half an ounce of cloves, and a quarter of an ounce of mace for thirty to forty minutes, skimming well. Strain, and when cold pour it free from the sediment into small dry bottles, and cork securely.
A Victorian store sauce built on green walnuts steeped in salted vinegar. It works, but everything depends on catching the walnuts at the right stage and on scrupulously clean bottles.
- Green walnuts, and whenThese are unripe walnuts picked before the inner shell begins to harden, usually late June to mid-July in the northern hemisphere. Test with a larding needle or skewer: if it passes straight through the whole nut without grating, they are ready. Once the shell sets they are useless for this.
- QuantityA hundred green walnuts is roughly 6 to 7 lb of fruit. The finished yield is variable but expect something in the region of two to three pints, since the nuts give up a good deal of their own liquor and the boiling reduces it.
- StainGreen walnut hulls are loaded with juglone, which turns skin brown-black for a week or more and does the same to worktops, cloths and wooden spoons. Wear gloves, work in stainless steel or glass, and never use an aluminium or copper pan with this much vinegar and salt.
- The steeping jarUse glass or glazed stoneware, cover loosely rather than sealing, and keep it somewhere cool. The daily stir is not decorative: it keeps the crushed hulls submerged in the brine so the exposed pieces do not go mouldy.
- AnchoviesTwo ounces means salted anchovies or oil-packed fillets rather than modern anchovy paste or essence, which may carry thickeners or other additions. They largely break down during the boil and read as savoury depth rather than fish.
- Spices wholeWhole pepper, cloves and mace blades are specified so they can be strained out. Ground spice will not clear and will leave the ketchup gritty. Half an ounce of cloves is assertive by modern taste; scaling the cloves back by half is defensible.
- The boil and the skimmingThirty to forty minutes at a gentle simmer, lifting the grey scum as it rises, as the recipe directs.
- BottlingBottles must be sterilised and genuinely dry, and the sauce decanted off the sediment as instructed. The vinegar and salt do the preserving, but a damp or dirty bottle will still throw a surface mould. Store dark and cool, and refrigerate after opening.
- Using itIt is generally said to improve with keeping and to last well. A spoonful goes into gravies, beef stews, devilled kidneys and steak sauces; it is a seasoning, not a table condiment to be poured on.
Walnut ketchup belongs to the older, pre-tomato meaning of the word: ketchup is generally thought to have reached English by way of Southeast Asian trade from a Hokkien word, usually given as kê-tsiap, for a brine of pickled fish, and for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries an English ketchup was a thin, dark, salty steeping liquor rather than anything sweet or thick. Mushroom and walnut were the two standard British versions, and the anchovies here may echo the sauce's fish-brine ancestry — the same instinct that produced Worcestershire and the various "store sauces" that Victorian kitchens kept in the cupboard to lift a gravy. Green walnuts were a genuinely seasonal windfall in a country with walnut trees in orchards and hedgerows, and the same brief summer window supplied pickled walnuts, walnut ketchup and nocino-style cordials.