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Walnut Catsup
To one gallon vinegar: Add 100 walnuts pounded. 2 tablespoonfuls salt. A handful horseradish. 1 cup mustard-seed, bruised. 1 pint eschalots, cut fine. 1/2 pint garlic. 1/4 pound allspice. 1/4 pound black pepper. A tablespoonful ginger.
If you like, you can add cloves, mace, sliced ginger, and sliced nutmeg. Put all these in a jug, cork tightly, shake well, and set it out in the sun for five or six days, remembering to shake it well each day. Then boil it for fifteen minutes, and when nearly cool, strain, bottle, and seal the bottles.--Mrs. A. C.
Walnut Catsup.
Take forty black walnuts that you can stick a pin through; mash and put them in a gallon of vinegar, boil it down to three quarts and strain it. Then add a few cloves of garlic or onion, with any kind of spice you like, and salt. When cool, bottle it. Have good corks-Miss E. T.
To make Catsup of Walnuts.
Bruise the walnuts (when large enough to pickle) in a mortar; strain off the liquor and let it stand till it be clear; to every quart thus cleared add one ounce of allspice, one ounce black pepper, one ounce ginger bruised fine. Boil the whole about half an hour; then add one pint best vinegar, one ounce salt, eight eschalots, or one ounce horseradish. Let it stand to cool; then strain it again, and bottle for use.--Mrs. M. P.
To make Walnut Catsup from the Leaves.
Provide a jar that will hold about three gallons. Mix the following ingredients: common salt one pound, one-half ounce powdered cloves, four ounces powdered ginger, one handful garlic sliced, six pods bruised red pepper, three handfuls horse-radish root, sliced. Gather the young leaves from the walnut-cut them small. Put a layer at the bottom of the jar; then sprinkle on some of the ingredients, and so on with alternate layers, until the jar is packed full. Let the whole remain in this state one night. Then fill with boiling vinegar, tie it closely, and let it set in the sun for a fortnight. Then press out the liquor; stain and bottle.--Mrs. E. W. Bay Sauce.
Get young walnut leaves while tender. Make a mixture of the following ingredients: one quart salt, one handful horse-radish, one-half dozen onions chopped up, two teaspoonfuls allspice, one tablespoonful black ground pepper. Put in a layer of the leaves, and then one of the mixture, so on till the jar is nearly filled; cover with good cold vinegar. Put it in the sun for a fortnight, then bottle. It will not be good for use until it is six months old.
This is an excellent sauce for fish. It will improve it to add a tablespoonful of ground ginger.--Mrs. E. C. G.
Bay Sauce.
One pound salt, one-half ounce cloves, four ounces ginger, all powdered; three handfuls garlic, three handfuls horseradish scraped fine, six pods of red pepper cut up fine. Gather leaves of black walnut when young, cut them up fine; put a layer of leaves in the bottom of a jar, then one of ingredients (mixed together), until the jar is filled; tie it up closely and set it in the sun for two weeks; then bottle for use. It is not good for six months. Some think two or three large onions an addition.--Mrs. H. D.
Six variations on one idea: unripe black walnuts (or the young leaves) steeped in salted, spiced vinegar to make a dark, salty table sauce in the pre-tomato ketchup tradition. The first four are workable in a modern kitchen; the two leaf-based "Bay Sauces" are the ones to leave on the page.
- The hinge: catch the walnuts green"forty black walnuts that you can stick a pin through" is the whole test — the nut must still be soft enough that a pin passes through hull and shell without resistance, which depending on region and season generally means somewhere from late June into July. Once the shell has begun to harden the nuts are no longer usable for this kind of sauce.
- Wear glovesGreen walnut hulls stain skin brown for a week or more and will stain wood, cloth and porous countertops permanently. Use nitrile gloves, an unlined stainless or enamel pot, and a glass or stoneware jar — the vinegar will pit aluminum and reactive metal.
- UnitsA pint is two cups, a quart four. "A handful" of horseradish is unmeasured — a loosely packed cup of scraped root is a reasonable reading. "Eschalots" are shallots. The 1/4 pound each of allspice and black pepper in Mrs. A. C.'s version is about a cup of each whole spice — enormous by modern standards, but it is flavoring a full gallon.
- Sun steepingSix days on a sunny windowsill or porch does the work of gentle heat and no more; the vinegar, not the sun, is what keeps the mixture safe. Shake daily as instructed so the salt dissolves and the mash stays wetted, and keep the jar corked or capped against insects.
- The boil and the strainFifteen minutes at a simmer is enough for Mrs. A. C.'s version. Miss E. T.'s reduction of a gallon to three quarts will take considerably longer than a novice expects — closer to an hour in a wide pan. Strain through a fine sieve, then again through a double layer of cheesecloth once the sediment has settled, or the bottled sauce will throw a thick sludge.
- Bottling and keeping"Seal the bottles" most likely meant sealing wax over the cork. Sterilized bottles with screw caps and refrigeration after opening are the practical equivalent. With this much salt and vinegar the sauce keeps well; note that it is the leaf Bay Sauces, not the nut catsups, that Mrs. E. C. G. and Mrs. H. D. say are not good until six months old.
- The leaf versionsBoth "Bay Sauces" and Mrs. E. W.'s leaf catsup pack young black walnut leaves in salt and vinegar. Walnut foliage carries juglone (as, in lesser degree, do the green hulls in the nut versions), and there is no current guidance on how much is acceptable to eat. There is little to gain here that the nut versions do not give you, and these three are probably best read rather than made.
- Yield and useMrs. A. C.'s gallon makes a great deal of sauce — no yield is given, but it is worth halving. Use it as the period did: a spoonful into gravy or a beef stew, brushed on grilled meat, or as Mrs. E. C. G. suggests, with fish.
Walnut catsup belongs to the older, broader meaning of the word: before tomatoes took the name in the nineteenth century, a "catsup" was any thin, dark, salty, long-keeping bottled sauce, and the term itself is generally traced to the Hokkien k u00ea-tsiap, a fermented fish brine that English traders encountered in Southeast Asia and then imitated with whatever was to hand — mushrooms, oysters, anchovies, green walnuts. The walnut version was a staple of English kitchens through the eighteenth century and carried straight into Virginia practice, where black walnut trees were abundant on farms. That six different contributors sent in versions to Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), which Marion Cabell Tyree assembled from some 250 Southern housekeepers, says something about how firmly this was still a fixture of the household stores: a July afternoon's work that gave you a year's worth of seasoning for winter gravies, made from nuts picked while still green.