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Pickled Walnuts
Gather walnuts (or butternuts), when soft enough to be pierced by a needle (July), prick each with a large needle well through, holding in a cloth to avoid staining the hands, cover with strong salt water (a pint and a half salt to a gallon of water),, let stand two or three days, changing the brine every day; then pour over them a brine made by dissolving salt in boiling water (let it get cold before using), let stand three days, renew the brine and let it stand for three days more. Now drain and expose to the sun for two or three days or until they become black, or put in cold water for half a day, and pack in jars not quite full. The proportions are a hundred walnuts to each gallon of vinegar. Boil vinegar eight minutes, with a tea-cup sugar, three dozen each whole cloves and allspice, a dozen and a half pepper-corns, and a dozen blades of mace. Pour the vinegar over the walnuts scalding hot. In three days draw off the vinegar, boil and pour over the walnuts again while hot, and at end of three days repeat the process. They will be fit to eat in a month, and will keep for years. - Mrs. C. T. Carson.
A true green-walnut pickle, made at the brief midsummer window before the inner shell hardens. Everything here works, but the timings are long and the staining is worse than the recipe lets on.
- The needle test is the whole recipeGreen walnuts must be pierced cleanly through the middle with a needle or skewer with no gritty resistance. The recipe puts that window in July; once the inner shell has begun to set, brining will not soften them again.
- Wear gloves, not a clothThe green husks stain skin a deep brown that has to wear off as the skin renews, over a week or two, and it will not wash out of cotton or wood. Nitrile gloves and a stainless or enamel bowl; avoid aluminum, which reacts with both the brine and the vinegar.
- The brine strengthA pint and a half of salt is a volume measure, roughly 1.5 to 2 lb, in a gallon of water — a very heavy brine, on the order of 15 to 20 percent. That is deliberate: it draws out the bitter tannins over the eight or nine days of soaking. Use pickling or kosher salt, since iodized salt can cloud the liquid.
- Why they turn blackThe blackening in the sun is oxidation of the juglone, not spoilage, and it is what gives the finished pickle its colour and flavour. Spread them in a single layer on a tray and turn them once or twice a day; two to three days of real sun is usually enough.
- Vinegar and the spicesUse a 5 percent cider or malt vinegar and do not dilute it. A "tea-cup" in nineteenth-century American receipts is generally reckoned at somewhere between a half and three-quarters of a modern cup. A dozen blades of mace is roughly a teaspoon or two of ground mace if you cannot find whole blades, though the blades give a cleaner infusion.
- YieldA hundred walnuts to the gallon of vinegar fills roughly four to five quart jars. Scale down freely: 25 walnuts to a quart of vinegar with a quarter of the spice keeps the proportions intact.
- The three hot fillingsReboiling and repouring the vinegar at three-day intervals restores its strength as the nuts give up water into it, which is why the pickle stays sharp. Do not skip it, and pour hot into hot jars to avoid cracking.
- StorageThe finished pickle is high in acid and keeps well, but jars sealed by hot fill alone are not shelf-stable by current standards. Keep them refrigerated, or follow a current tested water-bath process for the sealing step.
- ButternutsButternut (Juglans cinerea) is treated as interchangeable here and pickles the same way, but the tree has been devastated by butternut canker and is now scarce across its range. Green English or black walnuts are the practical choice.
Pickled walnuts are an English preserve of long standing, made from the same immature green nuts that also went into walnut ketchup and the dark walnut liqueurs of France and Italy; the technique of long salting followed by spiced vinegar appears in English household books well before the nineteenth century and crossed to America with little change. Its presence in Buckeye Cookery (1877), a Midwestern compilation of contributed receipts, reflects a household economy in which a walnut tree in the yard was a resource to be used at every stage — green for pickles in July, ripe for the table in October. The pairing with butternut is distinctly American: Juglans cinerea grew wild through Ohio and the Great Lakes states and was the settler's substitute for the English walnut, valued for its husks as a dye as much as for the nut. Mrs. Carson's promise that they "will keep for years" was the point of the exercise, since a jar of black pickled walnuts was a relish for cold meat in the months when nothing fresh was available.