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Walnuts, Pickled

A preserved green walnut dish pickled with spices, vinegar, and horseradish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Walnuts, Pickled

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the walnuts

  1. Scald the green walnuts to remove the skin.

  2. Soak the walnuts in a brine of salt and water strong enough to float an egg for three days. Change to fresh brine and soak for another three days. Shift to fresh brine again and soak for four more days.

Season and pickle

  1. Prepare equal parts of black pepper, Jamaica pepper, allspice, and ginger, along with ½ pint each of cloves and mace, and 1½ pints of white mustard‑seed. Mix the spices in a mortar without grinding them fine.

  2. Layer the walnuts in a jar, sprinkling the mixed seasoning between layers.

  3. Boil vinegar with sliced horseradish and ginger, then cover the walnuts with it. Let the mixture cool, then cork the jar and cover it with a bladder.

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. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,620 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Allspice + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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 brine and spice flavours.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out and seasons the walnuts during the long brine soak.
Vinegar
Acidity that preserves the walnuts and gives the pickle its sharp flavour.
White mustard-seed
Adds pungent, sharp flavour that mellows during the long pickling period.

The step that matters

Soaking in brine. The brine must be strong enough to float an egg and each soak must be fully completed with fresh brine. Weak or skipped brine lets the walnuts spoil before the acid and spices can preserve them.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (walnut, pepper, allspice, ginger, clove, mustard, vinegar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, pepper, allspice, ginger, clove, mustard, 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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