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Walnut Pickles
Put a quantity of the green rinds or outer shells of ripe walnuts into a tub that has a tap, sprinkle them with water and prop the tub up on the side opposite to the tap. Place a vessel under the tap to receive the liquor which will soon begin to drip from it. When a sufficient quantity has passed through add to one gallon of it a stick of horseradish, a bunch of sweet herbs, a couple of bay leaves, a good-sized onion, one-fourth of an ounce each of bruised ginger, allspice and black pepper and two heaping tablespoonfuls of salt. Put it over the fire and let it simmer for twenty minutes; strain and allow it to stand until cold. Then stir it up and put it into bottles, placing an equal quantity of the spices that were boiled in it into each bottle and corking them well.
This is a version of walnut ketchup — the dark, salty liquor drawn from green walnut hulls that English kitchens bottled by the quart. As written it cannot be made safely today, and the reasons are worth spelling out.
- No acid at allNearly every historical walnut ketchup is built on vinegar, often a quart or more to the gallon. This version has none: the liquid is husk leachate, salt, aromatics and nothing else. Without acidification it is a low-acid food by any modern measure.
- The salt is far too weak to preserveTwo heaping tablespoons of salt in a gallon works out to somewhere around one percent by weight. Brines relied on for preservation run many times that. This quantity seasons; it does nothing to hold spoilage organisms in check.
- Corked bottles at room temperatureA twenty-minute simmer is not a sterilising process, and corking a cooled low-acid liquid into bottles for indefinite storage creates exactly the oxygen-poor, non-acid, room-temperature environment in which Clostridium botulinum produces toxin. The spices are strained out and then divided among the bottles, and any handling at that stage risks recontaminating the cooled liquid.
- The drip stage is an uncontrolled fermentThe drip stage is uncontrolled -- Husks piled damp in a tub while the liquor seeps out is an open-air process at ambient temperature with no starter culture and no measured salt. There is no way to know what is growing in it.
- What the equipment meansThe tub with a tap is a wooden wash or brewing tub with a spigot near the base, propped so the liquid runs to one corner. "Green rinds or outer shells" are the fleshy hulls around the nut, gathered while still soft — they stain skin and cloth brown for weeks and are genuinely difficult to wash off.
- Weights and vague measuresA quarter ounce each of ginger, allspice and pepper is about 7 g apiece. A "stick" of horseradish means a length of fresh root, not a prepared condiment; the quantity is left to the cook. A "bunch of sweet herbs" is a tied bundle of herbs such as parsley, thyme and marjoram, bundled so it can be removed.
- If you want the flavourGreen walnut ketchup is still made, and is worth making — but follow a current recipe with measured vinegar and a proper hot-fill or refrigerated storage instruction. Do not adapt this one.
Walnut ketchup belongs to the long line of English "catsups" — mushroom, oyster, cockle, walnut — dark savoury liquors bottled in autumn and used by the spoonful in gravies and sauces through the winter. They predate the tomato version by a good century. As general practice, the green hulls had to be used at the stage when a pin would pass through the shell, which in England meant late June or early July, so the making of it was a fixed point in the household year.