Skip to main content
Main

Walnuts Pickled Green

A pickled green walnut preserve made by layering walnuts in vine leaves, vinegar, spices, and garlic, then fermenting and reheating.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Walnuts Pickled Green

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the walnuts

  1. Gather 50 large green walnuts before the shell hardens.

  2. Wrap each walnut in vine leaves and place them in a jar with more leaves to prevent touching.

  3. Cover the walnuts with pale vinegar and seal the jar tightly to exclude air.

  4. Let them sit for 20 days.

Refresh and pickle

  1. Pour off the vinegar, wrap the walnuts in fresh leaves, and refill the jar with fresh pale vinegar.

  2. Allow to sit for another 14 days.

  3. Remove the leaves and prepare a pickle with wine vinegar, coarse sea salt, cloves, mace, nutmeg, and sliced garlic.

  4. Simmer the pickle mixture for 15 minutes and pour it hot over the walnuts.

  5. Seal the jar tightly with bladder and leather.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Walnut + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Walnut + clovetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,592 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

Green walnuts
Form the pickled body; their unripe flesh softens and absorbs the vinegar and spices over time.
Pale vinegar
Acidity that preserves the walnuts and sharpens their flavour during the long steep.
Coarse sea salt
Draws out moisture and seasons the walnuts while helping keep the pickle preserved.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma that infuses into the vinegar and the walnuts.
Cloves
Contribute warm aromatic spice flavour to the pickle liquor.

The step that matters

Excluding air when sealing the jar. Walnuts must be fully covered by vinegar and the jar tightly sealed so air cannot reach them. Exposure to air lets mould and spoilage organisms grow, and the acidic liquid is what keeps the walnuts safe over the long steeping period.

Swap the garlic

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (walnut, vinegar, egg, clove, mace, nutmeg):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Garlicthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, vinegar, egg, clove, mace, nutmeg. 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes