Skip to main content
Main

To Pickle Walnuts

A pickle of walnuts prepared with vinegar, spices, and aromatics.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Mustard and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,832 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

To Pickle Walnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the walnuts

  1. When walnuts are full grown and can be pierced with a pin, place them in a strong brine of salt and water for 8 days, changing the brine twice.

  2. Spread the walnuts on a cloth in the sun until they change color.

Make the pickling vinegar

  1. In a pot, boil the vinegar with white pepper, mustard seed, ginger, horseradish, allspice, long pepper, and mace for 15 minutes.

  2. Add shallots and garlic to the vinegar 2 minutes before removing from heat.

  3. Let the vinegar cool, then pour it over the walnuts.

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 + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Ginger + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,620 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Mustard + allspicetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Allspice + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Walnuts
Provide the main body of the pickle, absorbing the spiced vinegar and softening as they cure.
Vinegar
Acts as the pickling liquid, preserving the walnuts and giving them their sharp, sour flavor.
White mustard seed
Adds sharp, pungent heat that mellows during the boil and flavors the vinegar.
Whole white pepper
Contributes warm, lingering pungency to the spiced vinegar.
Shallots
Add mild onion sweetness and aroma to the pickling liquid.

The step that matters

Boiling the vinegar with spices. Boiling extracts the aromatic and pungent compounds from the spices into the vinegar. Adding the shallots and garlic only briefly keeps them crisp and mild rather than overcooked and bitter.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Clovefits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, vinegar, mustard, ginger, horseradish, allspice, pepper. 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

Horseradish SauceHorseradish Sauce17 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes