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Pickled Walnuts
Gather walnuts (or butternuts) when soft enough to be pierced by a needle (July), prick each with a large needle well through, a needle (July), prick each with a large needle well through, holding in a cloth to avoid staining the hands, cover with strong salt water (a pint and a halfsalt to a gallon of water), let stand two or three days, changing the brine every day; then pour over them a brine made by dissolving salt in boiling water (let it get cold before using), let stand three days, renew the brine and let it stand for three days more. Now drain and expose to the sun for two or three days or until they become black, or put in cold water for half a day, and pack in jars not quite full. The proportions are a hundred walnuts to each gallon of vinegar. Boil vinegar eight minutes, with a tea-cup sugar, three dozen each whole cloves and allspice, a dozen and a half pepper-corns, and a dozen blades of mace. Pour the vinegar over the walnuts scalding hot. In three days draw off the vinegar, boil and pour over the walnuts again while hot, and at end of three days repeat the process. They will be fit to eat in a month, and will keep for years. - Mrs. C. T. Carson.
A long but largely unattended project: the walnuts do most of their work sitting in brine and sun. Two things decide success — picking the nuts early enough, and protecting your hands.
- The hinge: catch them before the shell setsThe needle test is the whole recipe. From roughly late June through July a green walnut can be pushed through with a large needle and no gritty resistance at the centre; once the inner shell begins to harden, no amount of brining will make it edible. Test several nuts from the same tree, since a single week can make the difference.
- Wear glovesGreen walnut hulls are full of juglone, which stains skin brown for a week or more and does not wash off. The cloth in the original is a poor substitute for nitrile gloves, and the juice will also stain wooden boards, countertops and clothing, often for good.
- The brine proportion"A pint and a half salt to a gallon of water" is a volume measure of salt - around 24 fl oz, on the order of 1 3/4 lb of fine salt to 3.8 litres of water. That is a very heavy brine, though still well short of saturation, and it is what is traditionally credited with drawing out the bitterness. Change it daily as directed; the discarded brine will be black.
- Text corruptionThe line "pierced by a needle (July), prick each with a large needle well through, a needle (July), prick each with a large needle well through" is a typesetting repeat in the original printing, not two separate steps.
- BlackeningSpreading the drained nuts in the sun turns them black by oxidation, two to three days as the recipe says. This is cosmetic and traditional rather than a preservation step; the cold-water alternative given may give a paler result.
- VinegarUse a vinegar at 5 percent acidity — malt is traditional for walnuts, cider works. Do not thin it with water. Boiling it eight minutes with the spices drives off some acetic acid, so start with a full-strength vinegar rather than a mild wine vinegar.
- Spice scale and yieldA hundred walnuts to a gallon of vinegar suits a farmhouse cellar. Scaled down, one quart of vinegar takes about 25 nuts, 3 to 4 tablespoons sugar (a quarter of the tea-cup), 9 cloves, 9 allspice berries, 4 or 5 peppercorns and 3 blades of mace. Yield depends on the size of the nuts, but a quart of vinegar with its walnuts will fill rather more than two pint jars.
- Jars and keepingPack loosely, as the instruction "not quite full" indicates, and keep the nuts submerged; anything above the vinegar line will mould. The triple hot-vinegar routine drives acid into the nut over nine days. Modern practice is to store the finished jars in the refrigerator, and to give them the month of resting the recipe asks for — freshly made they taste raw and harsh.
Pickled walnuts are an English preserve of long standing, carried into American cookbooks with the rest of the country-house pickle repertoire; they were the standard accompaniment to cold beef, game pie and hard cheese, and the pickling vinegar itself was prized as a sauce. The recipe survived in a book like The Dixie Cook-Book (1883), where a heavy salt brine turns something inedibly bitter into something that keeps in the cellar for years. The butternut offered as an alternative is Juglans cinerea, the white walnut, once common across the eastern United States and now scarce because of a fungal canker; a modern cook is far more likely to be working with English or black walnuts. The signature under the recipe is typical of the book, which was assembled from contributions by named local housekeepers rather than written by a single author.