68. Not Much to Do About Nocino
This summer, put a nut in charge of your schedule.
I believe that the best way to end a meal is with a wee dram of a nocino, the dark,1 medicinal Italian digestif made from green walnuts.2 And the best place to end a meal that way is at Edulis, where they make their own nocino every summer. Among the many ways we all suffered during the pandemic, my lack of access to their nocino was high on the list.
In the summer of 2022, deprivation grew so great that I knew I had to take matters into my own hands. I found a source for green walnuts and emailed the wonderful Tobey Nemeth, Edulis’s co-chef and co-owner, and asked if they might share their recipe/formula for it. And because Tobey is one of the kindest and nicest people I know, she sent it to me. That batch is long gone and I don’t make it to Edulis as often as I once did. (¿En esta economia?)34 So my nocino hankering has flared up again. Time to dig up the recipe.
In Italy, the nocino-making process traditionally starts on June 24th, the Nativity of St. John the Baptist.5 But walnuts are atheistic nonconformists who cleave not to the hoary superstitions of humanity and are thus not usually ready to be harvested until early July.6 I got a message from my walnut supplier that they would be ready soon and asking if I could pick them up the next day.
When I got them home from picking them up, I weighed the 70 walnuts I’d bought and entered that weight into the Nocino Calculator I’d made based on Edulis’s recipe.
Back out I went to secure the rest of the recipe. The cinnamon we typically buy in supermarkets is actually cassia bark. It can be aggressively spicy. By contrast Canela, or Ceylon cinnamon, or “true” cinnamon, is very deeply cinnamon-y, but also much softer and inviting; bouba to cassia’s kiki. Any Latin American grocery store should carry it. The one near our house sells a 75g bag for $5.7 Find some and do a smell test. You’ll be shocked at how harsh cassia is in comparison. Cloves and lemon are stock pantry items, so the only other thing I needed to get was booze. A lot of recipes and online resources tell you to use Alcool, Everclear, or some other kind of very high-proof neutral spirit, but Tobey said they just use vodka, so that was good enough for me.
The nocino-making process is quite simple:
Cut up the walnuts
Measure out the other ingredients
Put ‘em all in a jar
Be forewarned: green walnuts and their juice are very tannic. If not wiped up immediately, they will stain your countertops and cutting board. If you don’t wear gloves when handling them your skin will develop a blackish tinge that doesn’t easily wash off.
It’s good, not only for the recipe, but for your immediate olfactory pleasure, to rough up the canela a bit before adding it to your jar. Don’t wear gloves for this; your hands will smell wonderfully after. The lemon rind needs to be scraped clean of any white pith to impart just lemoniness and not bitterness.
Then pour in the booze, give it a good shake (with the lid on, preferably), and tuck it away in a cool, dark space. Within an hour the liquid in the jar will have darkened considerably. In 30 days, you can strain out the solids, add simple syrup to taste, and store it away again to age and let the tannins soften.8
If you’re reading this when it first came out, there’s still time to do this! Search kijiji or Facebook Marketplace and you’ll probably find someone selling walnuts. But you don’t have much time .
What I’m consuming…
This New York Times article, about the changing nature of influencers and content creators in the food world, features two accounts that I follow closely, Ertan Bek (@newyorkturk) and Kent Burriss (@dinewithkent).
I first learned about the Gastronomics podcast at a book event for NPR’s Planet Money in the spring. The lead author of the Planet Money book, Alex Mayyasi, announced that he was starting a new podcast about the intersection of food and economics. So far there have only been two episodes, one about the Domino’s Pizza Tracker and one about Aldi’s effect on the US grocery industry. Both have been fascinating. It definitely skews toward American topics, but it’s not hard to tease out the greater forces at play.
What’s on the menu…
Unlimited Vegetarian Thali at Iscon Thaal — When the walnuts weren’t ready on the day we planned to make nocino, we pivoted. We told the friends who were supposed to come over to make nocino with us that we would figure out an alternative plan. This turned out to be taking them thrifting at a Value Village they didn’t know about, and quick prowl through a great Indian supermarket (I was so hungry that their takeaway samosas were killing me), and then to dinner. North Etobicoke is not a place I am at all familiar with, but a quick search of the surrounding areas turned up Iscon Thaal. Our friends are vegetarian and even more fond (if it’s possible) of Indian food than we are, so we were checking many boxes.
(If you’re not familiar, a thali is an Indian style of meal in which a variety of dishes9 are presented to each diner on their own personal platter.)
We were shown to an open table, which was already set with an oval platter at each seat, holding about 10 small metal bowls. There’s no menu to peruse, so as soon as you’re seated, things start appearing. First a cumin-scented lemonade and a glass of lassi, which was a bit too tart for me at first, but with food was enjoyable. A server delivered a tray covered in breads like roti, puri, and paratha, each brushed with melted ghee before being placed on the platter. Then servers holding four pitchers of different (…looks at the restaurant’s website…) farsans and sabjis10 ladle their offerings into the bowls on your platter. There’s potatoes and paneer and really great eggplant/brinjal. Dessert lands as well. Chutneys and little balls of fried paneer appear. Rice and khichdi, a combination of rice and lentils (again topped with melted ghee) that has been called the national comfort food of India. And as soon as you’re finished with something, the server appears again and asks if you would like a reup.11
Photo courtesy of Michelle Munk Very quickly, you are full and happy. Shortly after that, you are overly full and questioning all of your decisions in life. It’s not exactly a roller coaster because the line from hunger to satiated to “those last little balls of fried paneer have wounded my soul,” is a very, very straight line.
When you’re finished, which considering the orbit speed of the servers and the lack of lingering over the menu, deciding on which signature cocktail you want to start with and if you’re really in a branzino mood, is faster than you might have expected, you just stand up and walk to the register. The math is quite simple: number of people x $30.12 Considering that the butter chicken at the Milestones a 15-minute drive away is $29 and, I assume, having never had the butter chicken at the Dixon Road Milestones and thus having no basis for comparison and no legal defence against libel or defamation, still feel completely confident in saying that it is nowhere near as satisfying or fun. This is a fantastic deal. We arrived at around 8:30 on a Saturday and there were a handful of empty tables. By the time we left, the place was full and tables were being turned over repeatedly. A food time was had by all. Highly recommended.
Unless you held your glass up to the brightest light, you would never know there’s a tinge of green in it.
Botanically, they are black walnuts, but they are green at this point in their ripening cycle. Green-black walnuts? Too confusing.
This is a comment on my economia, not a value-for-money judgement of Edulis, which is unimpeachable.
Yes, I know that’s St-Jean-Baptiste Day, but not in Italy.
Or possibly, walnuts ripen more slowly this far north.
Speaking of esta economia, the bag I bought at the same store in 2022 was $2.50.
Traditionally nocino is ready on Christmas, but again, “¿En este clima?” Michael Caballo, Tobey’s co-chef and co-owner and Edulis, has told me that sometimes it can take a year or even two for it to reach its peak state of drinkability.
Literal dishes. A whole array of tiny bowls.
The dishes were coming fast and furious and I was hungry, so I didn’t do the journalistic thing and stop to find out what everything was. What it was was gooood. Sadly, I’m not familiar enough with Indian (and specifically Gujarati) food to be able to recognize things by taste alone.
One review on Google complained about small portions. Uhhhh…. They must have written the review in the minute or two when no one was offering them a refill.
Just one caution, if you split the bill, the receipt you will be given shows the full amount for the table, but you will only be charged for your part. It’s looks like you got double-charged but you didn’t. It’s confusing but, on the call I made to straighten it all out, at least I could say, “We were the table of white people,” to narrow down who was calling to a single option.
Never had the digestive, but the apéro called vin de noix is common in France. The green walnuts are macerated with wine, eau-de-vie, sugar, and aromatics. Where I live in the Touraine the walnuts are replaced by the young shoots of plum trees to make vin d’épines in spring. Both are pretty good.