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To Pickle Walnuts

Walnuts are soaked in a salted brine, then packed with a vinegar pickle containing spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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

Cure the walnuts

  1. Prepare a brine with salt and water.

  2. Boil the brine until cooled, strong enough to float an egg.

  3. Skim the brine while it boils.

  4. Soak the walnuts in the brine for six days.

  5. Change the brine.

  6. Let the walnuts soak for another six days.

Pickle and jar

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

  2. Prepare a pickle with white-wine vinegar, pepper, pimento, ginger, mace, cloves, mustard-seed, and horseradish.

  3. Boil the pickle and cool.

  4. Pour the pickle over the walnuts, ensuring they are well covered.

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
Are the main food being preserved, softening and darkening during the long brine soak.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the walnuts and seasons them, helping preserve them in the brine.
White-wine vinegar
Provides the acidity that makes the pickle sharp and helps preserve the walnuts.
Mustard-seed
Adds a pungent, slightly bitter flavour to the pickle.
Garlic or shallot
Adds savoury pungency that mellows during pickling.

The step that matters

Boil the brine until cooled, strong enough to float an egg. The brine must be salty enough to preserve the walnuts and stop spoilage during the long soak. Boiling dissolves the salt fully and skimming removes impurities that could ferment. If the brine is too weak, the walnuts can spoil.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, 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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