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To Pickle Walnuts

Walnuts are pickled in a brine and vinegar mixture, then stored for six months.

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

To Pickle Walnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the walnuts

  1. Prepare a brine by boiling water with salt until strong enough to float an egg. Let it cool.

  2. Soak the walnuts in the brine for six days, skimming any foam while boiling.

  3. Change the brine and let the walnuts soak for another six days.

  4. Drain the walnuts and place them in a jar.

Pickle and store

  1. Prepare a pickle by boiling together white wine vinegar, pepper, pimento, ginger, mace, cloves, mustard seed, and horseradish. Let it cool.

  2. Pour the cooled pickle over the walnuts in the jar, ensuring they are fully covered.

  3. Seal the jar tightly and store in a cool place. They will be ready to eat in six months.

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. Garlic + gingertop 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. Garlic + peppertop 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
Main ingredient that softens and darkens as it soaks and pickles, becoming tender and flavourful.
Coarse sea salt
Creates the brine that draws out bitterness and firms the walnuts during the long soak.
White wine vinegar
Acid that preserves the walnuts and gives the pickle its sharp, tangy flavour.
Mustard seed
Adds pungent heat and sharpness to the pickle liquid.

The step that matters

Cooling the brine and pickle before use. Pouring hot liquid over walnuts can partly cook them and soften their texture, so both the brine and the pickle should be fully cooled before the walnuts are added.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Sesamefits better
  2. Chickpeafits better
  3. Beansfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, white wine, vinegar, mustard, garlic, pepper, ginger. 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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