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Walnuts Pickled White

A preserved walnut dish made by brining, simmering, pickling, and sealing with vinegar, spices, and suet.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Walnuts Pickled White

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the walnuts

  1. Pare walnuts until the kernel is visible.

  2. Place them in a brine of 1 pound salt and 1 gallon water, ensure they are fully submerged, and let stand for 5 hours.

  3. Simmer walnuts in clear water for 10 minutes.

  4. Transfer them to a pan of cold water with a handful of salt.

  5. After cooling, place the walnuts in a pickle of 2 pounds salt and 1 gallon water.

  6. Let pickle for 20 minutes.

  7. Remove walnuts and dry them between two soft cloths.

  8. Gently wipe each nut with soft old linen.

Pack and seal the jars

  1. In clean dry jars, layer walnuts with mace, cloves, and whole pepper.

  2. Fill jars with best white wine vinegar.

  3. Cover jars with strong paper.

  4. Pour melted mutton suet over contents.

  5. Seal jars tightly.

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 + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. White wine + vinegartop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,776 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Walnut + peppertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,039 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Largest walnuts
Form the pickled nut itself; their kernels soften and take on the brine and vinegar flavour.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the walnuts and seasons them during the brining stages.
Best white wine vinegar
Acidic liquid that preserves the walnuts and gives the pickle its sharp flavour.
Melted mutton suet
Fat poured over the contents to form a seal that keeps air away from the jar.

The step that matters

Drying the walnuts before jarring. Any surface moisture left on the walnuts dilutes the vinegar and encourages spoilage in the jar, so the nuts must be thoroughly dried before packing.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (walnut, white wine, vinegar, mutton, clove, pepper):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, white wine, vinegar, mutton, clove, pepper. 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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