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Walnuts, to have Fresh throughout the Season
INGREDIENTS. -To every pint of water allow 1 teaspoonful of salt.
Place the walnuts in the salt and water for 24 hours at least; then take them out, and rub them dry. Old nuts may be THE WALNUT. freshened in this manner; or walnuts, when first picked, may be put into an earthen pan with salt sprinkled amongst them, and with damped hay placed on the top of them, and then covered down with a lid. They must be well wiped before they are put on the table.
SEASONABLE.-Should be stored away in September or October.
Walnuts, Pickled. (Very Good.) -INGREDIENTS.-100 walnuts, salt and water. To each quart of vinegar allow 2 oz. of whole black pepper, 1 oz. of allspice, 1' oz. of bruised ginger.
WHEATEN FLOUR.
Procure the walnuts while young; be careful they are not woody, and prick them well with a fork; prepare a strong brine of salt and water (4 lbs. of salt to each gallon of water), nto which put the walnuts, letting them remain 9 days, and changing the brine every third day; drain them off, put them on a dish, place it in the sun until they become perfectly black, which will be in 2 or 3 days; have ready dry jars, into which place the walnuts, and do not quite fill the jars. Boil sufficient vinegar to cover them, for 10 minutes, with spices in the above proportion, and pour it hot over the walnuts, which must be quite covered with the pickle; tie down with bladder, and keep in a dry place.
They will be fit for use in a month, and will keep good 2 or 3 years.
TIME.-10 minutes.
SEASONABLE. - Make this from the beginning to the middle of July, before the walnuts harden. Note. When liked, a few shalots may be added to the vinegar, and boiled with it.
Two separate procedures run together here: keeping ripe shell walnuts sound through the winter, and pickling green walnuts in July. The second is the one worth the effort, and it hinges entirely on getting immature nuts.
- Green walnuts, not ripe onesThe pickle only works on nuts picked before the inner shell begins to lignify, roughly late June to mid-July in a temperate climate. Push a skewer or knitting needle straight through the nut; if it meets any grit or resistance at the centre, the shell has started to harden and the nut is useless for pickling.
- Wear glovesGreen walnut husks contain juglone and related compounds that stain skin a deep brown for a week or more and will mark worktops and cloth permanently. Nitrile gloves and an old apron, and prick the nuts over a tray.
- The brine, in modern terms4 lb salt to a gallon is about 1.8 kg to 4.5 litres of the old imperial gallon, near enough a saturated brine. Use a non-reactive container — glass, food-grade plastic or glazed stoneware, never bare aluminium or unlined copper — and keep the nuts submerged with a plate.
- Nine days, three changesChanging the brine every third day is not fussiness; it draws out the intensely bitter tannins in stages. Under-brined walnuts stay acrid no matter how long they sit in vinegar.
- Blackening in the sunThe nuts turn black by oxidation once drained and exposed to air. Two or three days on a tray in the sun is the original method; a rack in a warm airy place turns them just as black, if more slowly. Cover with mesh against flies and turn them so they colour evenly.
- Spiced vinegarPer imperial quart (about 1.1 litres) of vinegar: 2 oz (55 g) whole black peppercorns, 1 oz (30 g) allspice berries, and bruised ginger (the printed figure is unclear, 1 or 1 1/2 oz). That is a heavy hand by current taste; halving the pepper and allspice still gives a well-spiced pickle. Ten minutes at a simmer is enough to extract them.
- Bladder means a sealBladder tied over the jar mouth was the standard Victorian cover, drying tight as it shrank. Use sterilised jars with vinegar-proof lids - plastic-coated or plastisol-lined, since bare metal corrodes. Pour the vinegar on boiling hot, cover the nuts completely, and seal at once.
- Yield and keeping100 green walnuts fills roughly three or four 1-litre jars and needs something like 2 to 3 quarts of spiced vinegar. Store in the dark; a month is the minimum before eating and the flavour is much better after three. They genuinely keep for years, though the nuts soften over time.
- The freshening trickSalting ripe walnuts in water for 24 hours plumps a shrivelled kernel and makes it easier to skin, but it does nothing for rancidity. If a nut tastes of old paint, no soaking will save it. For long storage, a sealed container in the freezer beats damp hay.
Pickled walnuts were one of the great English store-cupboard relishes, eaten with cold beef, game pie and cheese, and the liquor left in the jar was used as a seasoning in its own right — walnut ketchup, a close cousin, was a standard bottled sauce well before commercial brown sauces existed. The July timing was fixed by the tree rather than by fashion: only in the few weeks before the shell sets can the whole nut be eaten husk and all, and the nuts are pricked with a fork to let the brine in. Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management and its later derivatives treat both entries here as ordinary domestic routine.