No. 834

Pickled Green Walnuts

Cerneaux Confits

These walnuts come ready prepared; serve on side dishes with a little of their liquor.

Walnuts preserved in sugar and drained, then laid in a vessel with vinegar, cloves and ginger make an excellent hors-d'oeuvre.

HOT SIDE DISHES (Hors-d'Œuvre Chauds).

The hors-d'oeuvre is composed of certain dishes served after the soup, somewhat taking the place of those formerly called "flying dishes," for they did not appear on the table, but were passed directly to the guests.

← No. 833 Green Walnuts Cold Side Dishes No. 835 Anchovy Fritters →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes you can buy green walnuts already pickled and only need to plate them, so the one actual method here — sugar-preserved walnuts redressed in spiced vinegar — is given without a single quantity. Treat it as a formula to be scaled rather than a recipe to be followed line by line.

What the ingredient isGreen walnuts are picked in early summer while the inner shell is still soft; the test is that a needle or pin passes through the whole nut without hitting anything hard. Once the shell sets, usually by early July in the northern hemisphere, the nut can no longer be pickled whole and only the ripe kernel is any use.
No quantities are givenThe original names vinegar, cloves and ginger but no amounts, and does not say whether the ginger is fresh or dried. Some nineteenth-century spiced pickling vinegars used a few cloves and a bruised piece of ginger per pint; anything more precise would be invention on our part.
"Come ready prepared"This is a professional restaurant kitchen buying in a preserve rather than making it. Jarred pickled green walnuts, sold mostly as an English condiment, are the direct modern equivalent, and sugar-preserved green walnuts are still made in Italy and the Balkans.
The vessel mattersUse glass or glazed stoneware. Spiced vinegar attacks bare copper, brass and unlined tin, and a walnut pickle will sit for weeks before it is worth eating.
Vinegar strengthHousehold vinegar at 5 percent acidity is what a pickle of this kind depends on for keeping. Diluted or low-acid vinegars will not hold a wet, sugar-laden nut, and the jar belongs in the refrigerator once opened.
HandlingGreen walnut hulls stain skin, wood and cloth a deep brown that does not wash out; the juglone responsible fades from the hands only as the skin renews. Wear gloves and work over something you do not care about.
ServingAs Ranhofer intends it, this is a side dish, not a course: a few nuts per person with a spoonful of their liquor, quartered or sliced if large. They are strongly sweet-sour and go with cold beef, ham, sharp cheese and pâté.

A Little History

Cerneaux is the French kitchen word for the kernels of half-ripe walnuts, lifted out of the shell while still soft; confits means preserved, whether in sugar, vinegar or spirit. Pickled and candied green walnuts were an old way of using a crop that is otherwise unusable for weeks, and they appear across English, French and Italian household books well before Ranhofer wrote. His placement of them is the more interesting point: The Epicurean (1894), the record of his years at Delmonico's in New York, files them among the cold hors-d' u0153uvre, and the note that follows explains that these small dishes replaced what were once called "flying dishes" — plates carried straight to the guests rather than set on the table. Ranhofer offers no explanation for the change.