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Pickled Walnuts
For walnut pickle, the walnuts should be gathered early in July. They should be so soft that a pin can be run through them. Lay them in salt and water for ten days, changing the water two or three times during this period. Rub off the outside with a coarse cloth and procceed to finish the pickle. For one hundred walnuts, make a pickle of two quarts of vinegar, one ounce of ground pepper, one ounce of ginger, and one-half ounce of mace, cloves, nutmeg and mustard seed. Put these spices in a bag, lay in the vinegar, and boil all together for a few minutes, then set the pickle away for use. If the vinegar is not very strong, add fresh vinegar to the last scalding of the pickle.
A traditional green walnut pickle, written for a household that took walnut trees for granted. Most of the work is in the picking and the brining; the spiced vinegar is straightforward.
- The pin test is the whole recipeThe walnuts must be immature enough that a pin or skewer passes cleanly through the whole nut, shell and all. Once the inner shell has begun to harden — usually by mid-to-late July in temperate climates, earlier in warm ones — no amount of brining will make them edible.
- Wear glovesGreen walnut hulls are loaded with juglone, which oxidises to a near-permanent brown-black on skin, fabric and wooden boards. Nitrile gloves and a non-reactive bowl, not aluminium or copper, which the acid and tannin will pit.
- The brineThe original leaves the salt strength unstated. A common working figure is about 4 oz salt per quart of water (roughly half a cup, depending on the grain of the salt), enough to cover; change it two or three times across the ten days as directed. The brine draws out the harshest tannins, and the walnuts will turn black in the air — that is correct, not spoilage.
- Drying between stagesOlder English versions spread the drained, rubbed walnuts on trays for a day or two until uniformly black before the vinegar goes on. This book omits the step, but it improves the colour and keeps the pickle from tasting watery.
- Spice quantities"One-half ounce of mace, cloves, nutmeg and mustard seed" reads as half an ounce of each, roughly 14 g apiece — a heavily spiced pickle by modern taste. Halving the cloves and mace is defensible; they dominate quickly.
- Vinegar strength"If the vinegar is not very strong" refers to a period when domestic vinegar varied widely. Use commercial vinegar at 5 percent acidity or higher, malt or cider for the traditional flavour, and do not dilute it.
- StoragePack the walnuts into clean jars, pour the strained boiling spiced vinegar over to cover completely, and keep them refrigerated. The book's "set the pickle away for use" assumes a cool cellar and a crock; if you want shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested water-bath procedure rather than this text.
- Yield and timingOne hundred walnuts and two quarts of vinegar will fill several quart jars, the exact number depending on the size of the nuts. They are edible after about a month and considerably better after three; a year in the jar is not unusual for this pickle.
Pickled walnuts are an English preserve of long standing, made from the fruit of Juglans regia gathered before the shell lignifies — traditionally before St Swithin's Day, 15 July, though the real deadline is set by the tree and the season. The same green nuts yielded walnut catsup, the dark tannic sauce that stood beside mushroom catsup on nineteenth-century tables. Butterick was a pattern and magazine publisher whose household manuals were aimed at women running a kitchen on a domestic year's rhythm, putting up in summer what would be eaten with cold meat all winter. By the time this was printed the pickle was already more inherited than invented — the instructions assume you have a walnut tree, a stone crock and ten days to spare.