In his Victorian novel Hard Times, Dickens describes someone eating lamb chops with Walnut Ketchup. I assume that was another umami-rich concoction, but I've always wondered exactly what it might have tasted like.
Jonathan, you've stumbled on the missing sibling from the essay: walnut ketchup was the third leg of the great pre-tomato ketchup triumvirate (mushroom, walnut, oyster), and in Dickens's England arguably the most prestigious of the three. (The eater, if memory serves, is Mrs. Sparsit, taking her chop at the Bank with wounded dignity; Dickens gives her the walnut ketchup as a marker of shabby-genteel respectability: a proper condiment for a woman who once had a proper station.)
What it was: green walnuts, picked in early summer before the shells harden, the same June walnuts that go into English pickled walnuts: crushed or pounded, buried in salt, and left to weep their black juice for days or weeks. That liquor was then boiled with vinegar, anchovies, shallots or garlic, and sweet spices (mace, cloves, ginger, black pepper), skimmed, reduced, and bottled. Some recipes (Eliza Acton has one; Mrs. Beeton too) let the brined pulp ferment properly before pressing. The result was a thin, near-black, pourable sauce, nothing like a paste.
As for the taste, you can triangulate it precisely from the ingredients: start with Worcestershire sauce as your base coordinate (anchovy umami, vinegar sharpness, spice warmth; Worcestershire is essentially this family's one industrial survivor). Then darken it: add the inky, faintly bitter tannin of green walnut, the flavour you know from nocino, or from the liquor in a jar of pickled walnuts, and a rounder, less sweet profile than Lea & Perrins, which cheats with tamarind and molasses. Saltier than modern palates expect, aggressively savoury, with that astringent walnut edge gripping the sides of the tongue.
On a hot lamb chop (absent the Talmusic fish/meat separation), it functioned exactly as you'd guess from my ketchup research.
When Mease's tomato ketchup and Heinz's descendants conquered the word, this is what they extinguished ; not a proto-Heinz, but something closer to fish sauce's English cousin.
Mrs. Sparsit would not have recognised the red stuff as ketchup at all.
Wow thanks so much for this interesting conversation!
One small correction though: It was not Mrs Sparsit who ate the lamb chop in question in Hard Times. She prepared and served it to Tom Gradgrind, a grumpy, spoiled youth, and the brother of her employer's wife - from whom she wanted to get some information! He ate it in a sullen silence that infuriated her!
Re the green unripe walnuts producing a dark black sauce: I now remember this peculiar feature of walnuts - and gallnuts - which can actually be used to make black ink!
Re the Talmudic advice against eating fish and meat together: As it is just that - advice - there are many observant Jews, and even entire communities - that do not observe this restriction. You may be interested in what I have written about this here:
You're quite right about Mrs. Sparsit, and I concede the point with pleasure; it's Tom Gradgrind who eats the chop, in a sullen silence that defeats the entire purpose of the lamb, the ketchup, and the India ale.
The condiment was bait, and the fish didn't bite. I'll take the correction as proof that this comment section has better fact-checkers than most newspapers.
Your walnut-and-gallnut point is even better than you let on.
Iron-gall ink, the ink of a thousand years of European archives, is tannin plus iron, and green walnut husk carries the same blackening tannins.
Mrs. Sparsit was pouring something chemically adjacent to ink over a young man's chop in the hope of extracting information. Dickens surely didn't know the chemistry. He didn't need to; the instinct was correct.
And thank you for the London minhag piece, which sharpens something I inadvertently flattened. You're right that the fish-meat rule is Talmudic medical advice rather than prohibition, and your Lopes Suasso recipes: beef with anchovies, that astonishing salmon-and-veal pie, show your tradition drawing the honest conclusion.
Mine drew the opposite one. The Baghdadi tradition, through the Ben Ish Hai, kept the separation as settled practice, and as well, when I cooked in a kosher restaurant in Basel, I was instructed to observe it at the stove, anchovy-free Worcestershire and all.
I note with some satisfaction that the Kaf Hahayim your article cites on the fish-and-milk printing error was himself a Baghdadi.
So the walnut ketchup turns out to be a little map of the Jewish world: kosher on your chop in Bevis Marks, off the plate in my grandmother's Calcutta, one Talmudic sentence, two communities, two readings, 70 posssibilities.
That distance between advice and law is, more or less, what I write about every week.
One more thought, and feel free to say no: this exchange has the bones of an essay, and I'd rather write it with you than mine your comment for it. One Talmudic sentence, fish and meat, a piece of ancient medical advice, and two traditions that read it in opposite ways: yours concluding, with the Lopes Suasso manuscript in hand, that lapsed medicine lapses; mine, through the Ben Ish Hai, keeping it as law all the way from Baghdad to an Ashkenazi kosher kitchen in Basel where I was told to hold the anchovies.
The Worcestershire bottle with its Beth Din proviso would sit at the centre, and the piece would need your S&P sources and your voice, not just your footnotes. So your London-Amsterdam material would be the western counterweight the project rarely gets.
If the idea appeals, write me at and we'll see if it holds together.
Thank you for 'catching us up' with the journey of the ketchup.
Enjoyed this immensely 🙏
Thank you!!
In his Victorian novel Hard Times, Dickens describes someone eating lamb chops with Walnut Ketchup. I assume that was another umami-rich concoction, but I've always wondered exactly what it might have tasted like.
So I have looked into that.
Jonathan, you've stumbled on the missing sibling from the essay: walnut ketchup was the third leg of the great pre-tomato ketchup triumvirate (mushroom, walnut, oyster), and in Dickens's England arguably the most prestigious of the three. (The eater, if memory serves, is Mrs. Sparsit, taking her chop at the Bank with wounded dignity; Dickens gives her the walnut ketchup as a marker of shabby-genteel respectability: a proper condiment for a woman who once had a proper station.)
What it was: green walnuts, picked in early summer before the shells harden, the same June walnuts that go into English pickled walnuts: crushed or pounded, buried in salt, and left to weep their black juice for days or weeks. That liquor was then boiled with vinegar, anchovies, shallots or garlic, and sweet spices (mace, cloves, ginger, black pepper), skimmed, reduced, and bottled. Some recipes (Eliza Acton has one; Mrs. Beeton too) let the brined pulp ferment properly before pressing. The result was a thin, near-black, pourable sauce, nothing like a paste.
As for the taste, you can triangulate it precisely from the ingredients: start with Worcestershire sauce as your base coordinate (anchovy umami, vinegar sharpness, spice warmth; Worcestershire is essentially this family's one industrial survivor). Then darken it: add the inky, faintly bitter tannin of green walnut, the flavour you know from nocino, or from the liquor in a jar of pickled walnuts, and a rounder, less sweet profile than Lea & Perrins, which cheats with tamarind and molasses. Saltier than modern palates expect, aggressively savoury, with that astringent walnut edge gripping the sides of the tongue.
On a hot lamb chop (absent the Talmusic fish/meat separation), it functioned exactly as you'd guess from my ketchup research.
When Mease's tomato ketchup and Heinz's descendants conquered the word, this is what they extinguished ; not a proto-Heinz, but something closer to fish sauce's English cousin.
Mrs. Sparsit would not have recognised the red stuff as ketchup at all.
Wow thanks so much for this interesting conversation!
One small correction though: It was not Mrs Sparsit who ate the lamb chop in question in Hard Times. She prepared and served it to Tom Gradgrind, a grumpy, spoiled youth, and the brother of her employer's wife - from whom she wanted to get some information! He ate it in a sullen silence that infuriated her!
Re the green unripe walnuts producing a dark black sauce: I now remember this peculiar feature of walnuts - and gallnuts - which can actually be used to make black ink!
Re the Talmudic advice against eating fish and meat together: As it is just that - advice - there are many observant Jews, and even entire communities - that do not observe this restriction. You may be interested in what I have written about this here:
https://sites.google.com/site/londonsephardiminhag/kashrut
Once again thanks for this interesting conversation!
You're quite right about Mrs. Sparsit, and I concede the point with pleasure; it's Tom Gradgrind who eats the chop, in a sullen silence that defeats the entire purpose of the lamb, the ketchup, and the India ale.
The condiment was bait, and the fish didn't bite. I'll take the correction as proof that this comment section has better fact-checkers than most newspapers.
Your walnut-and-gallnut point is even better than you let on.
Iron-gall ink, the ink of a thousand years of European archives, is tannin plus iron, and green walnut husk carries the same blackening tannins.
Mrs. Sparsit was pouring something chemically adjacent to ink over a young man's chop in the hope of extracting information. Dickens surely didn't know the chemistry. He didn't need to; the instinct was correct.
And thank you for the London minhag piece, which sharpens something I inadvertently flattened. You're right that the fish-meat rule is Talmudic medical advice rather than prohibition, and your Lopes Suasso recipes: beef with anchovies, that astonishing salmon-and-veal pie, show your tradition drawing the honest conclusion.
Mine drew the opposite one. The Baghdadi tradition, through the Ben Ish Hai, kept the separation as settled practice, and as well, when I cooked in a kosher restaurant in Basel, I was instructed to observe it at the stove, anchovy-free Worcestershire and all.
I note with some satisfaction that the Kaf Hahayim your article cites on the fish-and-milk printing error was himself a Baghdadi.
So the walnut ketchup turns out to be a little map of the Jewish world: kosher on your chop in Bevis Marks, off the plate in my grandmother's Calcutta, one Talmudic sentence, two communities, two readings, 70 posssibilities.
That distance between advice and law is, more or less, what I write about every week.
One more thought, and feel free to say no: this exchange has the bones of an essay, and I'd rather write it with you than mine your comment for it. One Talmudic sentence, fish and meat, a piece of ancient medical advice, and two traditions that read it in opposite ways: yours concluding, with the Lopes Suasso manuscript in hand, that lapsed medicine lapses; mine, through the Ben Ish Hai, keeping it as law all the way from Baghdad to an Ashkenazi kosher kitchen in Basel where I was told to hold the anchovies.
The Worcestershire bottle with its Beth Din proviso would sit at the centre, and the piece would need your S&P sources and your voice, not just your footnotes. So your London-Amsterdam material would be the western counterweight the project rarely gets.
If the idea appeals, write me at and we'll see if it holds together.
Wow. Have to look into that. Thank you!