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Pickled Walnuts

Pickled walnuts steeped in a spiced vinegar with ginger, nutmeg, pepper, mustard seed, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and walnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,230 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Pickled Walnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spices

  1. Break the ginger and nutmeg into pieces.

  2. Bruise the pepper slightly.

Make the spiced vinegar

  1. Add the spices to the vinegar just before it boils.

  2. Boil for 5 minutes, then pour out and cover tightly to cool.

Pickle the walnuts

  1. Place walnuts in jars and sprinkle with pounded mustard seed.

  2. Pour the spiced vinegar over the walnuts and cover tightly.

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. Nutmeg + walnuttop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Ginger + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Nutmeg + mustardtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,019 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Walnuts
Are the main food being pickled, absorbing the spiced vinegar and taking on its flavour over time.
Vinegar
Acts as the pickling liquid, bringing acidity that preserves the walnuts and carries the spice flavours.
Mustard seed
Adds a sharp, pungent flavour and is pounded before being sprinkled over the walnuts.
Ginger
Contributes warm, aromatic spice flavour to the spiced vinegar.

The step that matters

Adding the spices just before the vinegar boils. Boiling the vinegar with spices for the full time is what extracts their flavour; adding them too early or too late changes how much flavour the vinegar takes on. Pour the vinegar only after the boil, and cover tightly so the aromatic compounds stay in the jars.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Cashew nutfits better
  3. Sesamefits better
  4. Walnutthe original

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