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To Pickle Walnuts

A method of preserving walnuts by boiling, cooling, and storing them in vinegar with mace and oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 a saucepan of boiling water with a little salt for five minutes.

  4. Remove the walnuts and spread them between two clean cloths to cool.

Pickle

  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 them 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
The main ingredient, which softens and takes on the flavour of the vinegar and spices.
Distilled vinegar
Acidity that preserves the walnuts and gives the pickle its sharp flavour.
Mace
Warm, aromatic spice that flavours the pickling liquid.

The step that matters

Soak the walnuts in salt and water after paring. Cut walnut flesh darkens quickly when exposed to air because its natural compounds oxidise. Keeping the pared walnuts submerged in salt water slows this browning, so they stay pale for pickling.

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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