Months earlier than they ripen and drop, inexperienced walnuts are dramatically fragrant. When you probability upon a walnut tree in summer time, attain up and rub a plump, inexperienced nut. The scent launched is floral, wildly natural, and immediately uplifting. Other than that startling aroma, the immature walnuts of midsummer are additionally arguably simpler to course of and eat than their late-season iterations, whose robust, dry husks should be shucked to disclose the dry, shell-encased nutmeat inside. There are a number of methods to protect inexperienced walnuts (which at all times flip oxymoronically black), and walnut pickle recipes abound if you happen to do a fast web-search. However my favourite inexperienced walnut protect is nice, the place the boiled nuts bathe in a thick syrup, whose taste is exclusive.
Pictures by Marie Viljoen.
My introduction to preserved walnuts was by way of a tome I flip to usually for culinary leisure, for curiosities, and for misplaced strategies, preserved: Traditional Russian Cooking, by Elena Molokhovets, and translated by Joyce Toomre (see our mugwort story for one more point out). Molokhovets’ recipe requires wood hairpins, “delicate water” and a bladder (we don’t know whose). In any other case, the recipe makes full sense for the twenty first century. My solely adaptation is it to specify baking soda for softening water, and to regulate her technique for any quantity of nuts, moderately than for a selected weight.
The strategies for many inexperienced walnut preserves have just a few steps in widespread, particularly: Soak, boil, steep. Some name for peeling, some for pricking (I prick). And sure, all inexperienced walnuts flip deeply black. And, for weeks, so do your fingers, cuticles and nails, except you put on gloves. Put on gloves.
However earlier than we get to the recipe, extra concerning the walnuts.
The everyday nut known as for in a inexperienced walnut recipe could be Juglans regia, identified variously as widespread walnut, or English walnut. Its inexperienced husk has a easy pores and skin.
In North America native black walnuts (Juglans nigra) abound. They’re equally fragrant, however extra highly effective, I feel, by way of perfume, than widespread walnuts. Black walnuts’ pores and skin is distinctive and tough.
The important thing to creating inexperienced walnut preserves of pickles is to gather sufficiently immature nuts. Their inside shells should not have begun to harden throughout the outer, perfumed protecting inexperienced husk. To check whether or not your nut is ideal to protect, or too mature (regardless of being inexperienced), slide a skewer or sharp knife (or your wood hairpin) into its coronary heart. It ought to meet with no resistance. If the shell has already begun to harden inside, you’ll meet that impediment. Even, then, all shouldn’t be misplaced: You may nonetheless make a really aromatic and helpful syrup from these nuts, however the shell itself will keep laborious and won’t be enjoyable to eat. But when your skewer/knife/hairpin sails proper by, it’s preserve-making time. Accumulate away.
