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Pickled Butternuts and Walnuts

A pickled nut mixture seasoned with pepper, ginger, cloves, mace, nutmeg, mustard seed, and cider vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Pickled Butternuts and Walnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the nuts

  1. Pick butternuts or walnuts that can be pierced by a pin.

  2. Scald the nuts and rub off the outer skin.

  3. Soak the nuts in a strong brine for six days, changing the water every other day and keeping them covered.

  4. Drain and wipe the nuts, piercing each one several times with a large needle.

Season and pack

  1. Pound the black pepper, ginger root, cloves, mace, and nutmeg to a powder and mix well.

  2. Add the mustard seed to the spice mixture.

  3. Place the nuts in jars, layering them with the powdered seasoning.

Pickle and seal

  1. Boil the cider vinegar for five minutes and pour it hot over the nuts.

  2. Seal the jars tightly with corks.

  3. You can start eating the nuts in two weeks.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 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. Butternut + nutmegtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Butternut + mustardtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Butternuts or walnuts
The nuts are the main food, and their firm flesh holds up through the long brine and pickling.
Cider vinegar
Its acidity preserves the nuts and gives them their sharp, tangy pickled flavour.
Black pepper
Adds sharp, warm heat that penetrates the nuts as they pickle.
Ginger root
Contributes a warm, aromatic bite that flavours the pickling liquid and nuts.
Cloves
Add strong aromatic warmth that carries through the pickled nuts.

The step that matters

Soaking the nuts in brine. The brine must stay strong and be changed every other day, with the nuts kept covered. Salt draws out moisture and bitterness from the nuts and helps keep them from spoiling during the long soak.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butternut, pepper, ginger, clove, nutmeg, mustard, cider):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butternut, pepper, ginger, clove, nutmeg, mustard, cider. 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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