OF PICKLING WALNUTS AND OMELETTE ARNOLD BENNETT

My column from The Sunday Times, July 2024

We planted our three walnut trees twenty years ago and they are pretty impressive at this stage – except in one respect: they are not great croppers. In fact, only one of them has produced nuts in a respectable quantity and that was just for the past couple of years. Even then, the walnuts were very small and the outer skin was most reluctant to part from the hard shell.

Of course, what we should have done was to buy named a named variety bred for fruiting but back then I was in a hurry and all I knew was the walnuts are produced on a tree called Juglans regia. What I ended up was the common walnut and it doesn’t seem all too keen on the Irish climate.

This year has seen few nuts forming but there are a few and I think the best thing to do is to pick them towards the end of the month and pickle them. The advantage with this is that you use the whole “fruit”, skin and all, so size isn’t so important. And, of course, they keep.

Now, the general advice is to pick your walnuts for pickling at the end of June but ours were simply too small. Once I get them harvested before the inner shell goes hard, all should be well.

As for recipes, I’m still researching. There’s an elaborate eighteenth century one in the great Dorothy Hartley’s monumental Food in England and it seems to have been the basis for Constance Spry’s, published in 1956. Basically, you push a darning needles right through the walnuts (in their skins) in several places and put them in brine for a week. Then you scoop them out, let them dry for three days in a warm place and pack them into Kilner jars topped up to the brim with a well-spiced malt vinegar. They will be ready to eat in five weeks, or so I’m told.

By the time the walnuts go into the jars they will have turned black and so will your fingers if you don’t use rubber cloves when piercing them. The stain is so tenacious you have to just let it wear off, which will take weeks.

Pickled walnuts are traditionally eaten, sliced, with hard cheeses or with cold meats and they have been described – not terribly accurately in my view - as tasting like solid Worcestershire sauce.

I’ve tasted pickled walnuts only once, over twenty years ago when I bought a jar in a Waitrose in London; I have a vague memory that I wasn’t exactly seduced by them, but maybe the homemade version will sway me. Anyway, I can always give the stuff away…