IT’S PECAN TIME AGAIN

I have 13 pecan trees in my yard and not a single nut. I have a lot of shells on the ground, which means I would have had a lot of nuts, if it wasn’t for the squirrels. I never meant to get in the squirrel raising business. They chose me. When my son was growing up, we didn’t have as much of a problem. He had a pellet gun and a fair aim. He would shoot the squirrels and give them to Susie, our housekeeper who would fry them up with grits and gravy. People who like to eat large rodents thought they were good fixed that way. I could never bring myself to eat one. My granddaddy used to like squirrel brains and eggs for breakfast Mama said. If we were hungry, I’m sure we would have learnt to eat all manner of critters. We never got that hungry, thank God. I just looked at their skinny carcasses and gave thanks that they weren’t my supper.
Of course, we in the South know that most things are enhanced by pan frying and smothering in gravy, especially if you have a pan of cat head biscuits along side. I probably could eat the gravy off the squirrels, if not their rodent bodies.
As it is now, Susie died at 95 and Jeremy, the erstwhile hunter grew up and moved to the city. The squirrels and I stayed. I heard on NPR the other day that it’s not uncommon for squirrels to live 20 years. Some of the ones that didn’t get hit by the pellet gun may still be the fat, healthy one frolicking in my pecan trees.
Fortunately, this has been a bumper crop year for pecan trees in my friends’ yards. I am lucky to have generous friends. One came by yesterday and brought me 10 pounds of pecans she had picked up and cracked for me. Now, that is friendship. Picking up pecans is not easy work. It’s like Easter egg hunting with camouflage for adults. Pecan trees have wide spreading limbs. The wind carries the nuts as they fall, so they may or may not land in close proximity to the tree. I’m sure the professional tree harvesters have perfected a way of getting the nuts without the hunt or the nuts would be $100 a pound.
Anyway, all I have to do is pick the nuts out. On a cold winter’s evening, it’s something to do with your hands while you watch television. Unfortunately, it’s not cold yet here. We are in mid-November and I’m sitting on the porch barefooted and quite comfortable in the early morning. We’ve had a cold snap with a light frost, but the frost wasn’t enough to kill the flowers yet. I’ll probably sit on the porch and shell the pecans. Actually it will be more convenient to just toss the shells into the flowerbeds.
There is some discussion across the South about how to say pecan. We pronounce it with a like in “ah ha”. People in the Carolinas say it like “can”. We tell a joke about that. A woman from South Carolina was visiting in South Alabama. She went into a hardware store that advertised that it sold pecans. She pronounced it her way, saying “Do you have any pe-cans?’. The perplexed young man who waited on her scratched his head and said “No’m, but we’ve got some slop jars”. It must be an old joke, because we don’t even have slop jars now.
We may not agree on how to pronounce the nut, but we can agree on ways to serve it. Hands down the favorite is pecan pie. It is easy to make. Some people insist on whole nut halves in it. They must be better at picking out than I am because I don’t have that many whole nuts. I prefer chopped pecans because they get the sticky filling better distributed. It is an easy pie to make, but expensive in years when nuts are few.
One of my life’s ambitions is to be able to make a good homemade pie crust. I will go a hundred miles to eat a pie with a homemade crust. In fact, I do go 60 miles to Livingston to the Bakery Café where the Mennonites do make scratch crusts for their pies. In my kitchen, I have generic brand frozen crusts. I have learned that if you put the frozen crusts in for a few minutes before the filling, you are less likely to get a mushy crust. I do that for all pies with filling, including quiches. For pecan pies, I prepare the crust, then fill it with the simple filling that turns through the alchemy of baking into a crunchy, gooey pie that is perfect as is, or can be topped with a few teaspoons of bourbon while it is hot, then garnished with ice cream. I have even seen pecan pie in a jar, with the filling ready to be dumped into the crust (adding butter and eggs, of course) for sale at Black Belt Treasures in Camden. I make my filling by melting a stick of butter in a bowl in the microwave, then adding a cup of brown sugar, 2 tbps corn syrup, 2 eggs, and a dash of salt and a cup of chopped pecans. I then cook the pie very slowly, with a sheet of foil laid lightly over the top. The foil trick is something I learned from my former mother-in-law who was a wonderful cook (and a terrible gossip). I’m sure her place in heaven was earned by her pecan pie.
Other things that I like to do with pecans, is add them to any icing that has cream cheese in it (red velvet or Italian cream cake, for example). I like to use them in the cookies that we can either sand tarts because of their texture, or Viennese crescents by those of loftier language. I love to read old cookbooks and find the names of things with foreign titles that turn out to be things that people of other nationalities never heard of in the countries ascribed to the recipe, Chinese Beef Stew, for example. I love the way we country cooks upgrade our creations by giving them foreign names. Sometimes we do the same thing by adding pecans to squash casserole, or water chestnuts to green beans. We take the bounty of our harvests and create new things with it. For my part, I’m delighted that somebody thought of turning pecans into pies.