Before Ketchup Came in a Bottle, Americans Were Fermenting Walnuts

Picture this: It's 1750, and you're sitting down to a roast dinner somewhere in colonial Virginia. You reach for the condiment on the table — dark, glossy, pungent — and splash a generous pour over your plate. It's not tomato ketchup. It's not even close. What you're tasting is walnut ketchup, and for most Americans living in the 1700s, it was as ordinary as salt.

Today, almost nobody has heard of it. That's exactly why it deserves a closer look.

A Condiment With Serious Colonial Credentials

Walnut ketchup predates tomato ketchup by somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 years — which makes its obscurity all the more baffling. The word "ketchup" itself has nothing to do with tomatoes in origin. It likely traces back to the Hokkien Chinese word kê-tsiap, a fermented fish sauce that British traders encountered in Southeast Asia during the 1600s and brought home to Europe. From there, the concept of a thin, intensely savory condiment took off — and cooks started applying the fermentation logic to whatever was locally available.

In England and early America, that meant walnuts. Specifically, green walnuts — harvested in late spring or early summer before the shells had hardened — which were packed in salt, left to macerate, and eventually simmered down with vinegar, anchovies, black pepper, cloves, and sometimes a splash of port wine. The result was something that sat in a weird, wonderful space between Worcestershire sauce and soy sauce: deeply umami, slightly sour, with a sharp, almost medicinal edge.

Recipes for it appear in household manuals throughout the 18th and early 19th centuries. Hannah Glasse included a version in The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747), one of the most widely used cookbooks of the colonial era. It wasn't a novelty. It was pantry-staple territory.

So What Did It Actually Taste Like?

This is where things get interesting, because walnut ketchup didn't taste anything like what we'd recognize as ketchup today. There was no sweetness. No tomato tang. Instead, imagine something closer to a very complex, slightly bitter steak sauce — the kind of thing that makes a plain piece of meat suddenly taste like it has a history.

The green walnuts contributed a tannin-heavy backbone, almost like a bold red wine. The anchovies dissolved into the brine and disappeared as a distinct flavor, but left behind that deep savory quality that food scientists now call umami (a concept that wasn't formally identified until 1908, but that cooks had been chasing instinctively for centuries). Black pepper and cloves added warmth. A long simmer concentrated everything into a liquid that could be bottled and kept for a year or more without refrigeration.

People used it on fish, on game, on roasted vegetables, stirred into gravies. It was flexible, shelf-stable, and packed with flavor. By almost every practical measure, it was a brilliant condiment.

Why Did It Disappear?

The short answer: tomatoes showed up and won.

Throughout the 1800s, tomato-based ketchup grew steadily more popular, especially as large-scale commercial production made it cheap and consistent. By the time Heinz launched its iconic bottled version in 1876, the direction of American condiment culture was basically decided. Walnut ketchup required seasonal ingredients, time, and patience — none of which fit the industrializing food economy. It faded out of recipe books, then out of memory.

There's also the walnut supply problem. Green walnuts — the key ingredient — are genuinely hard to find in the US today. You need to harvest them before the shell forms, which means either growing your own trees or knowing someone who does. That's a significant barrier in a country where most people buy their produce from a supermarket.

The Fermentation Revival Is Changing the Equation

Here's where the story circles back to the present in a satisfying way. Across the US right now, a growing community of home fermenters, small-batch food producers, and culinary historians are quietly resurrecting walnut ketchup — and they're finding enthusiastic audiences.

Fermentation-focused cooks who spend their weekends making kimchi, shrubs, and miso have discovered that walnut ketchup slots naturally into that world. It's a long-form project — typically taking several weeks from green walnut to finished bottle — but the result is something genuinely unlike anything available commercially. A handful of small producers at farmers markets in states like Oregon, Vermont, and California have started selling limited batches, often billing it as a "colonial-era umami sauce" to give curious shoppers a reference point.

Food historians have also taken notice. Organizations like the Culinary Historians of New York have featured walnut ketchup in programming, and food writers who specialize in American culinary history have been making the case that it represents something real about how this country used to cook — resourcefully, seasonally, and with a lot more patience than we tend to have now.

Worth Ordering Off the Menu

Walnut ketchup isn't going to replace the red squeeze bottle on your table anytime soon. But its story says something worth sitting with: the condiment that defined American cooking for nearly two centuries has been almost entirely forgotten, and the one that replaced it is so dominant that most of us can't imagine an alternative.

If you ever spot green walnuts at a farmers market this summer, consider it an invitation. The recipe is out there — Hannah Glasse wrote it down nearly 300 years ago — and the flavor is one that most American kitchens haven't tasted in generations. That alone makes it worth trying.