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Pickled Walnuts

Pickled walnuts are preserved in a vinegar mixture with spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,832 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Pickled Walnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the walnuts

  1. Soak the white walnuts in a mixture of salt and water for 3 days.

  2. Place the walnuts in the sun until they turn black.

Pickle

  1. Boil the mustard seed, black pepper, cloves, mace, nutmeg, and horseradish in 4 quarts of vinegar.

  2. Cover the walnuts with the vinegar mixture and let them sit for 3 to 4 weeks.

  3. If desired, pour off the liquid for catsup and bottle it, then cover the walnuts again with cold vinegar.

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. Mustard + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Walnut + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  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

White walnuts
Provide the main body of the pickle, softening during salting and taking on dark color and flavor.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the walnuts and seasons them during the initial soak.
Vinegar
Acts as the pickling liquid, preserving the walnuts and giving them their sharp acidity.
Mustard seed
Adds pungent, slightly bitter flavor to the pickling liquid.
Black pepper
Adds sharp heat and aroma to the pickling liquid.
Horseradish
Contributes pungent, sharp heat to the pickling liquid.

The step that matters

Place the walnuts in the sun until they turn black. Sun exposure drives the darkening of the walnut skins, and under-darkened walnuts will look pale. Watch the color rather than the clock, since sunlight varies.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, mustard, pepper, clove, nutmeg, horseradish, 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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