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Walnut Catsup
Take one hundred walnuts; one onion (medium size); two quarts of vinegar; two tablespoons of pepper; six ounces of shallots; one-half pound of salt; two tablespoons of anchovies; one-fourth tablespoon of mace and one-half tablespoon of cloves. The walnuts should be green and tender enough to be pierced with a pin. Crush them in a mortar or a pan, and when well broken place them in a stone jar, with the shallots cut in pieces, the onion chopped fine, the vinegar and the salt. Let them stand two weeks, stirring them well three times a day. At the end of this time drain off all the liquid, put it into a stewpan with the rest of the ingredients and boil slowly one-half hour, stirring it well. Strain it, and when cold, pour it clear from any sediment, bottle and cork tightly. Store it in a dry place.
This is a true pre-tomato catsup: a thin, dark, salty condiment in the family of mushroom ketchup and Worcestershire, meant to be shaken over meat and into gravies rather than spread on anything. Almost everything hinges on catching the walnuts at the right stage.
- The window for green walnuts"Green and tender enough to be pierced with a pin" is the whole recipe in one line — the nut must still be soft all the way through, before the inner shell begins to lignify. Depending on variety, latitude and season that usually falls somewhere between mid-June and mid-July; once the shell begins to harden a pin will not pass through, and the walnuts are no use for this.
- Wear glovesCrushed green walnut hulls release juglone and related compounds that stain skin a deep brown that no washing removes; it wears off with the outer layer of skin over a week or more. Nitrile gloves, and an apron you do not care about.
- Quantity of walnutsOne hundND green walnuts is roughly 6 to 8 lb depending on variety and how early they were picked. If you are working from weight rather than count, aim for that range against the 2 quarts of vinegar.
- "Stone jar" means nonreactiveUse glazed stoneware, glass or food-grade plastic for the two-week steeping, and stainless steel for the boil. Two quarts of vinegar plus half a pound of salt will attack aluminium, unlined copper and bare cast iron and pick up a metallic taste.
- The seasoningsRead the pepper, mace and cloves as ground — everything is strained out at the end anyway. The "two tablespoons of anchovies" means mashed salt-cured anchovy fillets, about 6 to 8 of them, or the same volume of anchovy paste; they are there for glutamate depth, not fishiness.
- Salt is a preservative here, not a seasoningHalf a pound in 2 quarts is deliberate. Do not reduce it: with the vinegar it is what keeps the steeping mash from spoiling during two weeks at room temperature, and what makes the finished sauce keep.
- Straining and settlingStrain hot through several layers of muslin, then let it stand overnight and decant off the sediment as directed — the sludge is what turns bottled walnut catsup cloudy and slightly bitter.
- Yield and storageLess than the starting 2 quarts, since the mash holds back vinegar and the liquid is boiled half an hour; have several small bottles ready. Sterilise the bottles, fill hot, cork or cap tightly, and keep opened bottles in the refrigerator. Such sauces are generally said to be harsh at first and to round out with some months' keeping.
Before catsup meant tomatoes it meant almost anything thin, dark and savoury that could be bottled and kept: mushroom, oyster, cucumber, walnut. English cookery books were printing walnut ketchup by the middle of the eighteenth century, and the type — fermented mash, vinegar, anchovy, warm spice, strained clear — is generally regarded as one of the ancestors of the commercial bottled sauces that displaced it, Worcestershire among them. A sauce demanding a hundred hand-picked green walnuts and two weeks of stirring three times a day belonged to a household that still had a nut tree and a kitchen with someone in it all day.