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Pickled Walnuts

Pickled walnuts preserved in a vinegar and spice brine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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

Cure the walnuts

  1. Soak walnuts in a strong brine of salt and water for 8 days when they are soft enough to pierce with a pin.

  2. Chalk the brine 2–3 times to darken the walnuts.

  3. Place the walnuts on a large sieve in the sun.

Make the pickle

  1. Boil enough vinegar to cover the walnuts, adding 2 ounces of coarse sea salt per gallon. After boiling for 15 minutes, pour the vinegar over the walnuts.

  2. Seal the jar tightly with a clean rubber stopper.

  3. Boil the white pepper, mustard seed, ginger, horseradish, allspice, long pepper, mace, and bay leaves in a quart of vinegar for 30 minutes. Five minutes before removing from heat, add the shallots and garlic.

  4. Cool the spice mixture.

  5. Pour the cooled mixture over the walnuts, discarding some vinegar if necessary to ensure the spices are well mixed.

Seal and store

  1. Seal the jar first with a bladder.

  2. Seal the jar with leather.

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. Ginger + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,620 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Mustard + allspicetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Horseradish + allspicetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together654 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Allspice + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Walnuts
Main ingredient that softens during brining and darkens when chalked and sunned.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the walnuts during curing and preserves the pickle.
Vinegar
Acid that preserves the walnuts and carries the flavour of the spices.
White mustard seed
Adds sharp pungency to the pickling liquid as it steeps.

The step that matters

Curing the walnuts in brine until soft. Walnuts must be soaked long enough to soften fully before pickling; the brine draws out bitterness and water so the vinegar can penetrate. Stopping early leaves them hard and bitter.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Clovefits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

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