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Walnut Ketchup (INGREDIENTS walnuts handful)
INGREDIENTS. -100 walnuts, 1 handful of salt, 1 quart of vinegar, oz. of mace, oz. of nutmeg, oz. oz. of ginger, oz. of whole black pepper, a small piece of horseradish, 20 lb. of anchovies, 1 pint of port of cloves, shalots, wine.
Procure the walnuts at the time you can run a pin through them, slightly bruise, and put them into a jar with the salt and vinegar; let them stand 8 days, stirring every day; then drain the liquor from them, and boil, with the above ingredients, for about 1/2 hour. It may be strained or not, as preferred, and, if required, a little more vinegar or wine can be added, according to taste. When bottled, well seal the corks.
A Victorian store-cupboard condiment built on green walnuts picked before the shell hardens. The quantities in this entry are unreliable as printed, so treat the method as the guide and scale the seasonings by taste.
- Green walnuts, and the pin testThe whole recipe hinges on picking the nuts while a pin passes cleanly through the husk and immature shell, roughly late June to mid-July in the northern hemisphere. Once the shell begins to harden the fruit is useless for ketchup. They are a specialist buy now; some Italian and Middle Eastern greengrocers stock them briefly in season.
- Wear glovesGreen walnut husks contain juglone and will stain skin a deep brown that lasts a week or more. Bruise and handle them with disposable gloves, and keep the juice off worktops and cloth.
- Missing spice weightsThe ounce figures for mace, nutmeg, cloves, ginger and black pepper have not survived legibly in this entry, and the shallot and anchovy figures have run together. Season to taste rather than guessing at the printed figures.
- The anchovy quantity is wrongTwenty pounds of anchovies against one quart of vinegar is not a workable ratio. Comparable recipes call for two ounces to half a pound of salted anchovies, which dissolve into the boiling liquor and supply the savoury depth.
- Boiling timeThe printed "1/24 hour" is a corrupted fraction. Half an hour of gentle simmering is the usual instruction, long enough for the anchovies to break down and the spices to infuse.
- Salting stageEight days in salt and vinegar, stirred daily, draws out the bitter tannic liquor that becomes the ketchup itself; the drained walnut solids are discarded. Keep the jar covered and out of direct light, and use a non-reactive vessel rather than bare metal.
- Bottling and keepingSealing the corks was the period method for an airtight closure; sterilised bottles with screw caps do the same job. Despite the vinegar and salt, store the finished ketchup in the refrigerator once opened and use within a few months.
- Yield and useIt is a seasoning rather than a table sauce: a spoonful into gravies, beef stews, or a devilled sauce.
Walnut ketchup belongs to the older English sense of "ketchup" -- a thin, dark, salty, keeping sauce, closer to a mushroom or anchovy essence than to anything tomato-based. Recipes of this kind circulated in English cookery books from the eighteenth century onward, and the family resemblance to the fish sauces of Southeast Asia, from which the word is generally traced, is clearest in the anchovies boiled into the liquor here. Green walnuts arrive for only a few weeks in high summer, so households pickled some whole and turned the rest into ketchup and bottled it for the year, which is why the recipe sits in the store-sauce end of a Victorian domestic manual rather than among dishes.