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Pickled Butternuts or Walnuts

A pickled nut dish using butternuts or walnuts soaked in brine and preserved in a spiced vinegar solution.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and allspice 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 ↓

Pickled Butternuts or Walnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the nuts

  1. Gather butternuts or walnuts when soft enough to pierce with a pin.

  2. Soak them in strong brine for five days, changing the brine twice.

  3. Drain and wipe the nuts dry, then pierce each nut with a large darning needle.

  4. Soak the pierced nuts in cold water for six hours.

Make the pickling liquor

  1. In a pot, combine 1 gallon of vinegar, 1 cup of sugar, 36 cloves, 36 black peppercorns, 18 allspice berries, and 12 blades of mace.

  2. Boil the mixture for five minutes.

Pack and store

  1. Pack the nuts into small jars and cover them with the hot vinegar.

  2. Repeat the process twice within a week, then seal the jars and store them.

  3. The pickled nuts will be ready to eat in a month.

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 + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Butternut + allspicetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together12 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Allspice + macetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Butternut + clovetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together18 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Butternuts or walnuts
Provide the flesh that softens and absorbs the spiced vinegar as it pickles.
Vinegar
Acidic base that preserves the nuts and carries the spice flavour into them.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar with sweetness.
Strong brine
Draws out moisture and bitterness from the nuts before pickling.
Cloves
Add warm, aromatic spice flavour to the pickling liquor.

The step that matters

Piercing the nuts before pickling. Each nut must be pierced all the way through so the vinegar can penetrate the flesh. Unpierced nuts stay hard inside and take on little flavour, and the brine soak must be finished first so the nuts are not too salty or bitter.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butternut, vinegar, sugar, clove, allspice):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Gingerfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butternut, vinegar, sugar, clove, allspice. 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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