Creamy walnuts are made for the heavenly marriage of heady balsamic vinegar and the warm caramel of brown sugar. Together they make delicious pickled jewels, ready for a grand pairing with roasted meats, baked fish and any kind of vegetarian or vegan food.
Pickled walnuts were not on my radar until just before Xmas when we gathered our very first fruits from the giant black walnut tree at the foot of our potager. Holding court over the entire southern end of our garden, this majestic specimen is certainly an eye-catcher, providing a much-needed peaceful, shady spot to sit under, on a baking Summer's day, and from where you can gaze across the vegetable patch to the top field and the barn, and also glimpse the maison principale through the elderflowers.
Black walnuts are small, and as the name indicates, much darker than the English variety which is what we mostly know in our supermarkets. Interestingly, they are much creamier - like the difference between Devon clotted and single cream - and notoriously labour-intensive to prepare, being uncrackable with a standard walnut cracker and boasting a spongy outer shell which contains toxins that will dye your skin, stain your clothes and kill many plants it touches, and which must therefore not be left on the garden or compost heap, nor can you wash off the hulls and throw the water on the grass and hope it will thrive. Great care must be taken.
Armed with copious amounts of information and plenty of warnings about the devastation that a breach of etiquette around these things would herald, I donned gloves and filled a bucket with warm water, let the nuts soak and then washed and rubbed off the shells while drinking plentiful amounts of iced peach tea. With the black shells duly disposed of, into some old newspaper, wrapped up and burned, the nuts were dried in the sun and allowed to hang in mesh bags in our cold, dry larder over Winter, along with some English walnuts.
The English walnuts of course never disappoint in the eating - beloved as they are in salads and desserts, but the black walnuts - oh my. I think once you have had these, you may well lose interest in the former. The black walnut is to the English walnut as the white truffle is to the black. Unforgettable and something you will yearn for, when they are out of season.
With the sun returning to our neck of the woods, we had our first breakfast outside in the blazing sun today - the 26th Feb – and as I sat there, replete after scrambled eggs with croissants still warm from the baker and writer's sized mug of hot coffee before me, my thoughts turned to the black walnuts and the fact that we have been invited to dinner this evening with our delightful neighbours Isabelle, a former Primary School teacher, and Jean-Marie, a retired highlly skilled builder, who latterly specialised in wrought iron work.
In France it is normal to take a bottle and a little gift or two - which can be edible - and I know they eat soup each evening together, so what better than treating them to some pickled walnuts?
My inspiration for this recipe came from a jar of pickled onions, which I was gifted by someone, for whom it was surplus to requirements on the occasion of their return to the UK. Remembering the biting acidity of pickled onions standing in large jars on fish and chip shop counters - unappetising specimens from Dr Frankenstein's lab in mine eyes - I was not sure I would like them at all, but one deep inhalation of the glorous ingredients made me realise how mistaken I was, and the entire jar barely lasted a day. Indeed, I was so smitten with the flavour of the delectable jus that I decided to use the same for pickling the English walnuts that we had, and my goodness, they were good.
As a result of that success, I have been pickling walnuts regularly ever since and have today just done the same again for our dear friends. They have been cooling for a few hours and are awaiting their final journey into the jar. Interestingly, when I pickled my first English walnuts, I found they got snaffled within about three days, but the juice could be used for salad dressings or for drizzling over baked chicken, for example, and will last for up to a month, providing you keep it in the fridge.
When it comes to specific pairings, pickled walnuts are one accompaniment to warm the cockles when you partake of soup and cheese in Winter for sure, but it will also find a perfect match with many other dishes, enjoyed at other times of year, especially those incorporated into picnics - stuffed brioches; a trusty quiche or pie; olives, anchovies and salami on sticks; mackeral or liver pâté; retro home-made cheese balls for example; and of course roasted chicken and the historic lunch of a ploughman.
Be generous with how much you serve - nothing but a large serving spoonful will do. Any less than that, and you will soon be chastised for not making more.
Without further ado, here is the recipe. Read it, taste and weep - all good umami does that.
Prep time: 5mins Cook time: 10mins
Ingredients
1 crushed clove of garlic
1 teacup of brown sugar
1 teacup of balsamic
1 jam jar of walnuts
The empty jam jar, washed and dried
Method
1-Place garlic, balsamic and sugar in a saucepan and bring to the boil, stirring all the while until the mixture thickens, and then add the walnuts and cook until they turn transluscent.
2-Taste a walnut and the juice - it should be warm, tangy and mellow - and add more sugar if needed. If you do, simmer a little while longer to allow this to amalgamate into the whole.
3-Then allow the mixture to cool and fill into your jar.
4-Consume them like a lunatic before someone else does!
Pickled walnuts with feta cheese and a Dappled Apple*
Notes
Pickled walnuts make a wonderful gift to take along to a dinner party, banquet or bbq. Consider making more jars and gifting them in a little hamper at Xmas alongside spicy paprika cashews, candied lemon peel, and home-made mint sauce - all excellent accompaniments for cold cuts after the main event.
*A Dappled Apple is a smooth accompaniment for the saltiness of feta and the tang of the nuts. To make this: warm apple juice, brown sugar and caramel syrup and pour into a glass. Decorate with an apple slice. You can dip the apple slices in cinnamon and sugar and blowtorch them, then skewer on a cocktail stick for your garnish. The addition of Whiskey, Vodka or Apple Schnapps will make this suitably alcoholic for those requiring something stronger.
*** bon appetit ***
Credits: all photographs used are either mine or they have been sourced from Unsplash, a source of excellent, high quality pictures, which are free to use.
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