Name: Pickled Walnuts
Ingredients: 3 quarts white wine vinegar; sliced horseradish; sliced ginger; walnuts; coarse sea salt; cloves of garlic or shallots

Why it works: Ginger and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,038 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Pickled Walnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Bruise the tart seed mixture and layer walnuts in a jar, sprinkling with the mixture.
Boil the vinegar with horseradish and ginger, then pour it hot over the walnuts.
Cover the jar tightly and repeat boiling the vinegar and pouring it over the walnuts for 3-4 days.
Add garlic or shallots during the last boiling.
Let the walnuts pickle for five months before using.

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.

Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together6,038 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Horseradish + clovetop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,245 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Horseradish + walnuttop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together259 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Walnut + clovetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,592 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Ginger + walnuttop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together737 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (white wine, vinegar, horseradish, ginger, clove):

Chestnutfits better
Beansfits better
Cashew nutfits about as well
Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against white wine, vinegar, horseradish, ginger, clove. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.