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To Pickle Walnuts
After the walnuts have been in brine six weeks, scrape and wipe them with a coarse towel. Put them in plain vinegar, and let them remain for a week or two. Drain them well-place in a jar, and pour over them vinegar spiced and prepared as for yellow pickles, omitting the turmeric and lemons, and using black pepper instead of white.--Mrs. S. T.
This is the last stage of a process that begins in early summer, and the original assumes you have already read the entries around it. Two things matter most: the nuts must be picked while still entirely soft, and every vessel must be non-reactive.
- The nutsGreen walnuts only, picked when a needle passes through the whole nut without meeting shell — roughly mid-June to early July in much of the US. The recipe does not say which walnut is meant; either black or English may be intended. Once the inner shell has begun to harden the pickle will be woody and unpleasant, and brining will not fix it.
- Wear glovesGreen walnut hulls are loaded with juglone, which stains skin a deep brown that lasts a week or more. Nitrile gloves and an apron you do not care about; the same juice will mark countertops and wooden spoons.
- The missing brineThe book gives no strength. A strong pickling brine of roughly 1 cup pickling salt per quart of water, fully covering the nuts and renewed every few days across the six weeks, is one workable reading; period recipes vary and often leave it unstated. Nuts must stay submerged — weight them with a plate.
- VesselsGlass, glazed stoneware or food-grade plastic throughout. Brine and vinegar will pit aluminum and react with bare iron or copper, and the tannin in the walnuts turns metallic on contact.
- Why they go blackDraining and spreading the scraped nuts in the air for a day before they go into vinegar lets the juglone oxidize and blacken evenly. This is cosmetic but it is what makes a pickled walnut look like a pickled walnut.
- "Spiced as for yellow pickles"That recipe elsewhere in the book is a spiced vinegar, of the usual sort — mustard seed, whole spices, ginger, horseradish and the like; consult the yellow pickle entry itself rather than this list. Here you drop the turmeric and lemon (they would fight the dark colour) and use black peppercorns rather than white. The recipe does not say whether the vinegar goes on hot or cold.
- Storage and patienceTreat these as a refrigerator pickle unless you are following a current tested canning procedure — the recipe gives no processing time or temperature. They need at least two months in the jar before the harshness fades, and they improve for a year.
- YieldAbout 2 lb of green walnuts fills a quart jar. Served in small quantity alongside cold beef, ham or hard cheese, not eaten by the handful.
Pickled walnuts are an English inheritance, and their presence in a Virginia household book is a straightforward marker of how conservative Anglo-American preserving remained through the nineteenth century: Hannah Glasse and Eliza Acton both give versions, and the technique "14 long salt brine to leach the bitter tannin, then spiced vinegar "14 appears to have changed little since the eighteenth century. The same green nuts were also the basis of walnut catsup, one of the standard savoury condiments of the period. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named local women, credits this one to "Mrs. S. T." and, like much of the book, assumes the reader already knows the neighbouring recipe for yellow pickle "14 a reminder that these collections were written for cooks inside a shared tradition rather than for strangers.