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Pickled Walnuts

Pickled walnuts soaked in brine, boiled with vinegar, spices, and garlic.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,053 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Pickled Walnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the walnuts

  1. Choose walnuts that a pin can easily pierce.

  2. Soak the walnuts in a mixture of salt and water for one week, changing the brine twice.

  3. Drain the walnuts and place them in a pot with enough vinegar to cover them.

Pickle

  1. Bring the mixture to a boil and cook for 15 minutes.

  2. Add black pepper, ginger, mace, bay leaves, mustard seed, and garlic to taste.

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 + garlictop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  2. Ginger + garlictop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,402 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Pepper + garlictop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Walnut + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together849 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Walnuts
Form the pickled base, absorbing the brine and vinegar flavours as they soften.
Vinegar
Provides acidity that preserves the walnuts and gives the pickle its sharp flavour.
Salt
Draws out moisture and bitterness from the walnuts during the brine soak.

The step that matters

Soaking the walnuts in brine. The walnuts must soak for the full week with the brine changed twice. Salt draws out bitterness and moisture, and fresh brine keeps the soak effective, so skipping or shortening it leaves the pickle bitter and less well preserved.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, vinegar, pepper, ginger, mustard, garlic. 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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