Skip to main content
Dessert

Savoury Pickled Walnut

A savory bread pudding made with milk, eggs, pickled walnuts, and herbs, baked in a buttered dish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Savoury Pickled Walnut

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. Soak the bread in the milk.

  2. Add the parsley, herbs, onion, eggs, and seasoning to the soaked bread.

  3. Mash the pickled walnuts.

  4. Dissolve part of the butter in a pan and add it along with the mashed walnuts to the mixture; mix well.

Bake

  1. Butter a pie dish with the remaining butter, pour in the mixture, and bake.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Walnut + parsleytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together865 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set into a firm, sliceable loaf when baked.
Allinson bread
Provides the soft base that soaks up the milk and gives the loaf its body.
Milk
Softens the bread and adds moisture so the mixture bakes tender.
Pickled walnuts
Add the sharp, savoury, tangy flavour that defines the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and helping the top brown.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk, egg, walnut, vinegar, parsley, butter):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, egg, walnut, vinegar, parsley, butter. 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.

You might also like