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Dessert

To Fickle Walnuts

A preserved walnut dish pickled in vinegar, salt, 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 Fickle 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 saltwater to prevent them from turning black.

  3. Boil the walnuts in salted 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.

  2. Fill the bottles with distilled vinegar and add a blade or two of mace and a large teaspoon of eating oil.

  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
Form the pickle's main body, absorbing the vinegar flavour as they steep.
Distilled vinegar
Acidity that preserves the walnuts and gives the pickle its sharp, tangy taste.
Mace
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour that infuses the walnuts during pickling.
Eating oil
Forms a thin layer on the surface that helps seal the walnuts from air.

The step that matters

Paring the walnuts. Cutting too deep removes flesh and exposes the inside to air, and the walnuts can darken. Soaking in salted water protects the cut surfaces from browning, which is why the record's soaking step matters.

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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