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Pickled Walnuts
Run a needle through soft walnuts; cover with strong brine of salt and water; let stand in brine for a week, draining off brine every day, and covering with fresh brine. Then drain and wash walnuts, cover with vinegar, boil ten minutes, add a bag of spices, cover closely, and keep in cool place three weeks.
For bag of spices, mix four tablespoons each of cloves, peppercorns, mace, celery and mustard seed.
An English-style pickle in an American chocolate-company cookbook, and one that depends entirely on catching the walnuts at the right stage. Everything else is straightforward brining and spicing.
- "Soft walnuts" is the whole recipeThese are green walnuts, picked while the shell inside is still jelly and has not begun to harden. The needle is the test, not a decoration: it should pass through the whole nut without meeting grit. In most of the northern hemisphere that means late June to mid-July; once the shell sets, the nut is useless for pickling.
- Wear glovesGreen walnut hulls contain juglone and related compounds that stain skin a deep brown-black for a week or more, and the needle-pricking stage is the messiest part. Disposable gloves, and nothing you care about on the counter.
- Strong brineA common period test was a brine strong enough to float a fresh egg, roughly 1 lb (450 g) salt per gallon (3.8 L) of water. Use non-iodised salt. Draining and re-brining daily for a week is what leaches out the bitter, tannic juices of the raw green nut.
- Vinegar strengthUse commercial vinegar at 5 percent acidity, malt or cider for flavour. The acid is what preserves the pickle, so do not dilute it or substitute a low-acid wine vinegar.
- VesselsBoil the vinegar in stainless steel or enamel and store in glass or glazed stoneware. Vinegar attacks bare iron, aluminium and copper, and it will pull metal into the pickle along with an off flavour.
- The spice bag makes a lotFour tablespoons each of cloves, peppercorns, mace, celery seed and mustard seed is about 1 1/4 cups of whole spice, far more than a domestic batch needs. For a few pounds of walnuts, scale to roughly a tablespoon of each and tie it in muslin so it can be lifted out.
- Three weeks is a minimum"Cool place" meant a cellar at around 50F (10C); a refrigerator does the same job. The walnuts turn glossy black, and many cooks find they are better after a month or more and go on improving. Keep them submerged in the vinegar throughout.
- YieldThe original gives no quantity. Reckon on roughly 2 lb (900 g) of green walnuts filling a quart jar, with enough vinegar to cover them.
Pickled walnuts are an English preserve of long standing, eaten with cold roast beef, ham and hard cheese, and their appearance in Lowney's Cook Book (a promotional cookbook issued by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company in the early 1900s) shows how thoroughly British larder practice had settled into American household books. English tradition holds that green walnuts must be gathered by St. Swithin's Day, 15 July, after which the shell has hardened; the date is folklore rather than horticulture, but it lands about right for the English climate. The week of daily brine changes is the part no modern cook should skip, since green walnut hulls are heavily tannic and the salt draws out what the vinegar cannot mask. The by-product of the same fruit, walnut ketchup, was a common Victorian sauce, more usually made from the salted juice of crushed green walnuts, with the leftover brine-and-spice liquor being one route among several.