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Dessert

To Pickle Walnuts

A method for preserving walnuts by pickling them in vinegar, salt, mace, and oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Walnut and mace work together. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 765 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

To Pickle Walnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the walnuts

  1. Pare the walnuts until the white appears, being careful not to cut too deep.

  2. Soak the walnuts in salt and water to prevent them from turning black.

  3. Boil the walnuts in salted boiling water for five minutes.

  4. Spread the boiled walnuts between two clean cloths to cool.

Pickle and store

  1. Place the cooled walnuts in wide-mouthed bottles and fill with distilled vinegar.

  2. Add a blade or two of mace and a large teaspoon of eating oil to each bottle.

  3. Cork the bottles well and store in a dry place.

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. Walnut + macetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together765 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Walnut + vinegartop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,769 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  3. Vinegar + macetop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,415 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Large french walnuts
Provide the main ingredient that is pared, boiled and pickled whole.
Distilled vinegar
Acidifies the walnuts and preserves them in the pickling liquid.
Mace
Adds a warm, aromatic spice flavour to the pickled walnuts.

The step that matters

Paring the walnuts. Cutting too deep removes flesh and exposes more surface to air, and the walnuts must be soaked in salt water promptly so they do not darken.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, vinegar. 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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