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Pickled Walnuts
1 peck hulled walnuts Vinegar 1/4 lb. cloves 4 tablespoonfuls mustard seeds 2 tablespoonfuls black pepper 1 pint (2 cups) grated horseradish 2 pepper pods 2 sliced onions I garlic clove
This is an ingredient list rather than a method, and it assumes a cook who already knows how pickled walnuts are made. The important steps — choosing the nuts, brining them, and covering them with hot spiced vinegar — are all left unwritten.
- The nuts must be greenPickled walnuts are made from immature nuts picked in early summer, while a needle will pass through the whole nut without meeting a shell. Once the shell begins to harden — usually by mid-July in temperate climates — the crop is no longer usable for pickling.
- "Hulled" is ambiguousGreen walnuts are not shelled; the husk and the nut are pickled together. The word here most likely means rubbed or wiped clean of the downy skin, not stripped of the husk. Pricking each nut several times with a fork is the step most modern recipes call for at this point.
- A peckA peck is 8 dry quarts, roughly a quarter bushel — somewhere in the region of 10 to 12 lb of green walnuts. That is a very large batch by household standards and fills several quart jars.
- The missing brineThe step the list omits is the one that makes the pickle edible. Green walnuts are ferociously tannic and are traditionally soaked in strong salt brine for one to two weeks, changed several times, then drained and left in the air until they blacken. Skipping it gives a pickle too bitter to eat.
- Vinegar, unmeasuredNo quantity is given because the vinegar is simply whatever it takes to cover the nuts. Use a vinegar of at least 5 percent acidity — malt is the English tradition, cider works — and boil it with the spices before pouring it over.
- The spicing is heavyA quarter pound of cloves is an enormous amount even for 10 lb of walnuts, and reflects a period taste for aggressively spiced condiments. Halving the cloves and the pepper gives something closer to modern palates without unbalancing the pickle.
- Stained handsGreen walnut husks contain juglone, which dyes skin a deep brown that takes a week or more to wear off. Wear gloves throughout the hulling and pricking.
- Storage and maturingFor a shelf-stable jar, follow a current tested pickling procedure for hot-fill and processing times; otherwise keep the jars refrigerated. Either way the walnuts want at least six weeks, and are better after six months, before they are worth eating.
- ServingA quantity this size yields several quarts. Pickled walnuts are a condiment, served a nut or two at a time with cold beef, ham, game pie or hard cheese.
Pickled walnuts are one of the oldest surviving English store-cupboard preserves, appearing in English recipe collections by the seventeenth century and made from young nuts gathered before the shell hardens. The technique travelled to America with English settlers and appears in household manuals throughout the nineteenth century, often with the same telegraphic brevity found here. The dark, soft, intensely savoury result is still made commercially in Britain, where it remains standard with cheese and cold meat.