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Pickled Walnuts
Gather the walnuts when well grown, but still soft enough to be pierced through with a needle. Run a heavy needle through them several times and place them in strong brine, using as much salt as the water will absorb. Let them remain in brine for a week or ten days; then drain the nuts and expose them to the air until they have turned black. Pack them in jars and cover them with boiling vinegar prepared as follows: To a gallon of vinegar add an ounce each of ginger root, mace, allspice and cloves, and two ounces of peppercorns, one cupful of sugar; boil them together for ten minutes and strain on the nuts. Let them stand a month before using.
A straightforward vinegar pickle, but everything depends on catching the walnuts at the right stage — once the shell has begun to harden inside the green husk, no amount of brining will save them.
- The needle test is the whole recipePush a darning needle straight through the equator of a nut. If it meets grit or resistance in the centre, the shell has begun to harden and the nut is past pickling. The traditional window is roughly late June to mid-July, but it shifts with climate and variety.
- Wear glovesGreen walnut husks are loaded with juglone, which oxidises to a brown-black stain that will not wash off skin for a week or more. Nitrile gloves and a work surface you do not care about.
- "As much salt as the water will absorb"A saturated brine is about 6 oz of salt per pint of water (roughly 360 g per litre) — keep stirring in salt until crystals sit undissolved on the bottom. Use plain pickling or kosher salt; iodised salt darkens the liquid.
- Change the brineSome versions of this pickle drain and re-brine partway through, which is said to draw out more of the bitter tannin. The book's single week-to-ten-day soak works, but the finished pickle will be sharper.
- BlackeningSpread the drained nuts in a single layer on a rack in full sun and turn them once or twice a day. They go from green to bronze to true black in one to three days, faster in hot weather. Uneven colour is cosmetic, not a fault.
- Vinegar strengthUse a vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity — malt is traditional, cider works. Anything weaker, including many artisan wine vinegars, will not reliably preserve a low-acid nut.
- The spicesAn ounce each of whole ginger root, mace, allspice and cloves to the gallon is generous by modern taste; halve the cloves if you do not want them to dominate. Everything is strained out, so whole spice only — ground will cloud the jar and settle as sludge.
- Jars and fillingUse sterilised canning jars, pack the nuts loosely, and pour the boiling strained vinegar over to cover by half an inch. Seal while hot and store in a cool dark place; the nuts must stay submerged or the exposed ones will mould.
- Timing and yieldA month is the minimum; three months is better, and pickled walnuts are generally said to improve with a year in the jar. The book gives no yield: a gallon of spiced vinegar covers a large batch, but how far it goes depends entirely on how tightly the jars are packed.
Pickled walnuts are an English preserve of long standing — recipes appear in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century household books, and the pickle was firmly established as an accompaniment to cold beef, game and hard cheese by the time American cookbooks began reprinting it. The method exists because the green walnut, harvested before the shell sets, is soft but ferociously astringent, and only a long salting followed by a spiced vinegar makes it palatable. That its appearance in an American general cookbook is brief and unfussy suggests the compiler expected readers to recognise the pickle rather than need persuading of it; households with a walnut tree had an annual surplus and a narrow few weeks in which to use it. The blackening step, which looks alarming, is simple enzymatic oxidation of the husk — the same reaction that stains the hands of anyone who handles green walnuts, and the reason walnut husks were long used as a dye for wool and wood.