Provençal recipe

Green walnut hull ratafia

Recipe no. 548 Reboul, 1909 Pantry

Recipe no. 548 from Jean-Baptiste Reboul's La Cuisinière provençale (1909), page 244.

Ingredients

Preparation

  1. Preparing the walnutsPound two dozen green and tender walnuts in a mortar.
  2. MaceratingPut the pounded walnuts into a jar or a stoneware jug. Add 2 litres of brandy, about twenty cloves and half a grated nutmeg. Cover and let infuse 30 to 40 days.
  3. FilteringPour the mixture onto a horsehair sieve set over an earthenware dish.
  4. Adding the sugarPut the filtered juice back into a clean jar with half a kilo of sugar.
  5. Resting and decantingLet stand 8 to 10 days for the sugar to dissolve. Decant and bottle. Keep in a cool place.

Reboul's text

Pound in a mortar two dozen green and tender walnuts and put them into a jar or a stoneware jug; add 2 litres of brandy, about twenty cloves, and half a grated nutmeg; cover the jar and let infuse 30 to 40 days. Then pour onto a horsehair sieve set over an earthenware dish. Put this filtered juice back into a clean jar with half a kilo of sugar. Let stand 8 to 10 days to give the sugar time to dissolve. Decant and bottle. Keep in a cool place.

Small Provençal glossary for this recipe

Reboul writes in French: no Provençal word appears in this recipe, apart from the dish's name itself. The table below gives the Provençal equivalents of the words used, in mistralian spelling, translated by Lingua Nostra. Each form is attested in our Provençal-English dictionary; click to open the entry.

ProvençalEnglish
mourtiémortar
dourgojug
gresstoneware
aigo-ardèntbrandy
sedassieve
sucresugar
trasvujadecant

Source: Jean-Baptiste Reboul, La Cuisinière provençale, Marseille, 1909, recipe no. 548, page 244. Public domain. Transcription, formatting and Provençal glossary by Lingua Nostra.