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Walnut Pickle

A pickled walnut rind preserves made with salt, onion, horseradish, herbs, spices, and ginger.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,620 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Walnut Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Extract the juice

  1. Place the green rinds of ripe walnuts in a tub with a tap-hole.

  2. Sprinkle the walnuts with water and tilt the tub to allow juice to collect in a vessel below.

  3. Once enough juice has collected, measure 1 gallon of the liquid.

Make the pickle

  1. Add ½ cup of coarse sea salt, 1 chopped onion, horseradish, sweet herbs, bay leaves, black pepper, allspice and bruised ginger to the juice.

  2. Boil the mixture slowly for 20 minutes.

  3. Strain the mixture and let it cool.

Bottle

  1. Stir the cooled mixture and bottle it, adding the spices into the bottles.

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. Allspice + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,620 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Horseradish + allspicetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together654 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Pepper + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Onion + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Walnut + allspicetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 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

Green walnut rinds
Provide the juice that forms the base of the pickle and gives it its dark colour and bitter, earthy flavour.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the liquid and helps preserve it by drawing out water and slowing spoilage.
Horseradish
Adds sharp, pungent heat that mellows during boiling and keeps the flavour from tasting flat.
Allspice
Adds warm, aromatic spice notes that flavour the liquid.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture slowly. Gentle heat extracts the flavours from the herbs and spices without driving off too much liquid or making the pickle harsh. A hard, fast boil can concentrate the liquid unevenly and turn the sharp seasonings bitter.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (walnut, horseradish, pepper, allspice, ginger):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, horseradish, pepper, allspice, 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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