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Compote of Walnuts
Split the walnuts through their natural division with the point of a knife, then pass the knife through the inner part of the shell and extract the interior. Free the nuts from the white pith, and place them in cold water that has been slightly acidulated with lemon-juice. Drain the walnuts, pile them in a heap on a compote-dish, pour over some syrup that has been well flavored with noyau, and serve.
A one-line dessert that depends entirely on the quality of the nuts: it wants fresh, new-season walnuts, not the dried ones sold year-round. The original assumes you know what noyau is and how much syrup to make.
- Use wet walnutsThe instruction to split the shell along its seam and lift out an intact kernel, then strip the white pith, only works with fresh autumn walnuts, sometimes sold as "wet" walnuts. In a dried supermarket walnut the papery pellicle is bitter and bonded to the meat, and the halves break up.
- The pith is the pointWhat Oscar calls the white pith is most likely the pellicle, the tannic skin. Left on, it makes the whole dish astringent under the syrup. On fresh nuts it peels away in sheets, sometimes more easily after a brief soak.
- Acidulated waterRoughly the juice of one lemon to a quart of cold water. It keeps the peeled kernels from oxidising to a dull grey while you work through the rest, and it should be a holding bath of minutes, not hours, or the nuts turn soggy.
- NoyauA sweet liqueur flavoured with stone-fruit kernels, sold today as crème de noyaux, usually dyed pink. Almond extract or amaretto gives a similar note if you cannot find it. Do not attempt to make noyau at home from apricot or peach kernels.
- The syrupNot specified, but a standard compote syrup is equal weights sugar and water boiled two or three minutes and cooled; flavour it off the heat with a tablespoon or two of noyau per cup so the alcohol does not cook off. Pour it over the nuts cold.
- Compote-dishA footed glass or silver bowl, shallow and wide. Any shallow serving dish works; the nuts are meant to sit in a mound with the syrup pooled around them rather than swimming.
- Yield and serviceFigure about a pound of in-shell walnuts and a cup of syrup for four. It is an end-of-meal sweetmeat, served with small spoons, and is good alongside a plain cream or ice.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection records the Waldorf's kitchen at a moment when the French repertoire governed American hotel dining, and the compote section is straight out of that tradition: fruit or nuts held in flavoured syrup, served cold at the close of a meal. Noyau, distilled or infused with apricot, peach or cherry kernels, was a fashionable nineteenth-century flavouring precisely because it echoes almond, and pairing it with walnut may well have been intended as a play of one nut note against another, though the one-line recipe says nothing of the cook's reasoning. The recipe also assumes a seasonal larder most modern cooks have lost: fresh walnuts arrive in a short autumn window, and the whole method, splitting the soft shell by hand and peeling the skin, belongs to those few weeks. Oscar himself, famously, was a ma u00eetre d'h u00f4tel rather than a chef, and the book reads as a house record of what the dining room sent out.