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Walnuts, to Preserve
Fill an earthen pot with them, and cover them with clay an inch thick. At Christmas-time they will be found as fresh as when first gathered. Another way is to put the walnuts into a common earthenware jar with an earthenware lid, and bury the jar in the earth about a foot deep in a place not too wet nor too dry. A third way is as follows. Gather the walnuts on a dry day, and directly they are taken out of the rind, put them into large flower-pots holding two pecks (any pans, however, will do as well), and when nearly full cover the pots two inches thick with sawdust. Place the pots on the floor in a wine-cellar.
This is a storage method rather than a cooked dish: three ways to keep autumn-gathered walnuts from drying out and going rancid before the Christmas dessert table. The logic is sound, but the conditions are hard to reproduce and easy to get wrong.
- What the method is actually doingFreshly hulled walnuts still hold a good deal of moisture in the kernel, and it is that moisture, not the shell, that makes the difference between a sweet nut and a shrivelled one. Clay, buried earth and sawdust all serve to hold humidity steady and keep out air and light, which slow the oxidation of the nut's high oil content.
- The hinge: too wet and they mouldThe instruction to choose ground "not too wet nor too dry" is doing a great deal of work. Walnuts held moist at cellar temperature are prone to surface moulds, including Aspergillus species that can produce aflatoxin, and a nut that smells musty or shows any bloom on the shell should be discarded rather than cracked.
- Two pecksA peck is eight dry quarts, so two pecks is about 16 quarts, or roughly a four-gallon container. Any crock, pail or plastic tub of that order does the same job, as the recipe itself concedes.
- SawdustUse only clean, untreated hardwood sawdust if you try this. Sawdust from a modern workshop may carry glue, varnish, preservative or MDF resin, none of which belongs against food.
- "A wine-cellar"Read this as a steady 50-55F with high humidity and no light. A domestic garage or shed swings too far in both directions; an unheated cellar or a cool root store is nearer the mark.
- How long "until Christmas" isEnglish walnuts come in from late September into October, so the book is claiming roughly ten to thirteen weeks. That is a realistic span for the method, and it is not a long-term preservation technique in any modern sense.
- What most cooks will do insteadA modern alternative -- For anything beyond a few weeks, shelled walnut kernels keep far better sealed and frozen, where the oil stays sweet for about a year. In-shell nuts dried down to a rattling kernel and kept cool and dark will also see out the winter without burial.
Cassell's was written for households that treated walnuts as a fixture of the dessert course, cracked at the table and eaten with port, and the whole point of these three methods is to have nuts in that fresh, faintly milky condition at Christmas rather than the dry, papery state they reach by mid-winter. English walnut trees crop in a narrow window in early autumn, so the kitchen's problem was always one of holding, not of getting: green walnuts were pickled around midsummer while the shell was still soft, and the ripe crop was then buried, sanded or sealed away. Burying produce in earth or packing it in sand and sawdust was standard practice for carrots, beets and apples in the same period, and the walnut instructions are simply that general root-cellar habit applied to a fatty nut. The reliance on a wine-cellar is itself a clue to the readership Cassell's assumed.