Article from: Gourmet Magazine-The magazine of Good Living Southern Comfort Below the Mason-Dixon Line, good eating at this time of year begins on the back roads and ends with pecan perfection
By John T. Edge
Autumn in America’s traditional Pecan Belt, anchored to the east by Georgia and to the west by Texas, calls to mind a golden idyll—a season of cerulean morning skies, crisp afternoon breezes, and a bounteous harvest of fresh pecans just waiting to be crumbled into corn bread dressing, tucked into a pie or tart, perched atop a sugary shortbread cookie, or tasted, salted and eaten out of hand. Traveling blacktop back roads when the green, four-winged husks are just beginning to open and the zeppelin shaped pecans are dropping pell-mell from the boughs of wizened trees, it seems that with every curve you take, another roadside stand stacked high with slat-board buckets of silken nuts comes into view.
And while it’s true that the pervasiveness of the pecan down South guarantees a steady supply for hunters and gatherers who still collect windfall nuts in tin pails and tattered pillowcases, the sheer volume of our nations’ 300-million-plus-pound annual crop requires a mechanized solution.
Each fall, before the leaves begin to drop from the trees, large-scale farmers deploy fleets of Rube Goldberg contraptions that roll through the pecan orchards, grasping trees in bear hugs and shaking nuts loose from the branches in a piñata-like shower. Following in their wake comes oversize vacuum cleaners that collect the nuts and transport them back to a sorting house, where they are graded by size and either cracked for their meats or sold whole by the bag.
AMONG PECAN FANCIERS, there is much debate about which cultivars bear the best nuts. (Though pecans are indigenous to North America, most commercial production focuses on improved varieties.) The Schley, Desirable, Choctaw, Cheyenne, Elliott, Centennial, Mahan, and Stuart varieties all have their fans.
Many old-time Georgians swear by the Elliott, which yields a small, plump, deeply-furrowed meat that conjures wide-wale corduroy and tastes of fresh-churned butter. Down in Louisiana, provincial types point to the Centennial, in homage to an enslaved gardener named Antoine, who, while in service at Oak Alley Plantation along the Mississippi River, is believed to have performed the first successful graft of a pecan tree in the winter of 1846 or 1847. Some 30 years later, the nuts from the Oak Alley trees were exhibited at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.
Texans will contend that although the Georgia harvest is the largest in the nation and natives of Louisiana do indeed make a fine praline, their state is the more like the motherland of pecans. And whereas most botanists would confirm their contention, a Texan is more likely to prove his point by handing you a peck of paper shell Mahans.
Only one matter is beyond dispute: New-crop pecans are essential. Because the nuts have such a high fat content—more than 70 percent—they can turn rancid if left unrefrigerated for any length of time. (They keep frozen for months.) Chances are good that the pecans on your grocer’s shelf in November and December were harvested this fall and are now at their buttery best.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Two mail-order services that we particularly like are Ellis Bros. (800-635-0616) and Pearson Farm (888-423-7374).