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Pickled Walnuts

Pickled walnuts soaked in brine, then preserved in a spiced vinegar solution.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Pickled Walnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the walnuts

  1. Take well-filled and tender walnuts.

  2. Pierce each walnut three or four times with a strong needle.

  3. Soak the walnuts in a brine that completely dissolves its salts, changing the brine daily for nine days.

  4. Spread the walnuts in the air until they become black.

Make the pickle and serve

  1. In a pot, combine vinegar, ginger root, allspice, mace, whole cloves, and peppercorns.

  2. Boil the mixture for ten minutes.

  3. Pour the hot mixture over the walnuts in crocks.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Ginger + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,620 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Allspice + walnuttop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Walnuts
Provide the main body of the pickle, absorbing the spiced vinegar and softening as they cure.
Vinegar
Acts as the pickling liquid, preserving the walnuts and giving them their sharp, tangy flavour.
Ginger root
Adds warm, sharp aroma that flavours the pickling liquid.
Whole cloves
Contribute strong aromatic spice that infuses into the vinegar and walnuts.

The step that matters

Spread the walnuts in the air until they become black. The walnuts must darken fully through exposure to air, which is a browning reaction of the exposed surface oxidizing. Stopping early leaves a pale, unevenly coloured pickle.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, ginger, allspice, clove, walnut):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, ginger, allspice, clove, walnut. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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