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Pickled Walnuts

Pickled walnuts soaked in salt and water, then sun-dried, boiled with spices in vinegar, and preserved.

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 white walnuts in salt and water for three days.

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

Make the pickling liquid

  1. Boil mustard seed, black pepper, cloves, mace, nutmeg, and horseradish in vinegar.

  2. Cover the walnuts with the vinegar mixture.

  3. Let them sit for three to four weeks.

Finish and bottle

  1. Pour off the liquid for catsup and bottle it.

  2. 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
The main ingredient, which darkens in the sun and absorbs the spiced vinegar flavor.
Vinegar
Its acidity preserves the walnuts and gives the pickle its sharp, tangy taste.
Mustard seed
Adds sharp, pungent flavor to the pickling liquid.
Horseradish
Adds a sharp, biting heat that stands out against the sweet spices.
Black pepper
Adds warm, sharp heat to the pickling liquid.
Cloves
Adds a warm, aromatic flavor to the pickling liquid.

The step that matters

Place walnuts in the sun until they turn black.. The color change comes from the walnut skins darkening through oxidation, and it signals that the walnuts are ready for the pickling liquid. Stopping early leaves them pale and less developed in flavor.

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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