Laura of Lines in Pleasant Places.

I put the names in the proverbial hat and drew out Laura’s name —which seems only fair since she has been with me throughout this November Is Pecan Month Journey. I don’t know if I started any pecan cravings among the bloggers or if the Pecan Growers of America owe me a commission from their increased pecan sales, but I had fun celebrating the Pecan in November. I hope you did, too.

Laura will be receving a bag of freshly shelled pecans as soon as she sends me her address. In the meantime, check out some of her wonderful recipes and some of the other pecan posts in the linky below. It’s too late for the contest, but if you have another pecan-related post you’d like to add, feel free. The more pecans, the merrier.

Powered by… Mister Linky’s Magical Widgets.

There’s an ancient old Texas pecan tree

If it could talk, it would boast many tales to tell;

Now it stands quiet–a new sprawling mall built

Within yards of its Texas trunk–

Passers-by still stop to rest in its ancient shade–

But no one will ever know what the pecan tree knows–

Because it will never, never ever tell!

I found this poem at the Texas State Historical Society website.

LAST CHANCE: If you’ve written anything related to pecans —a recipe, a joke, a story, even more trivia— please leave a link. Everyone who leaves a link will be entered in my contest to win a bag of pecans from our annual Pecan Odyssey, shelled by the Semicolon family, mostly me. I’ll be drawing a name tomorrow. In the meantime, check out some of the pecan-related stories and recipes other bloggers have left to tantalize and make you appreciate the lowly pecan.

The Nueces River was named by the Spanish explorer La Salle in honor of the pecan trees growing along its banks.

The pecan tree is the state tree of Texas.

Georgia usually produces the most cultivated pecans for sale of any state in the U.S. Texas comes in second.

You may thresh the pecans from the tree or thrash them. Both words mean essentially the same thing.

In Cajun country, if you’re a “gone pecan” you are doomed, lost, unrecoverable. Let’s hope New Orleans isn’t a gone pecan. (Has anyone actually heard this idiom used in conversation or seen it in print? I just found it on the internet.)

The World’s Largest Pecan Tree and the story of a visit to it.

San Saba, Texas calls itself the Pecan Capital of the World.

If you’ve written anything related to pecans —a recipe, a joke, a story, even more trivia— please leave a link. Everyone who leaves a link will be entered iin my contest to win a bag of pecans from our annual Pecan Odyssey, shelled by the Semicolon family, mostly me.

We went on our annual pecan purchasing journey on Saturday. We always take a Saturday in early November to go to Richmond, Texas to R. B. Bagley and Sons Pecan Warehouse. There we purchase an inordinate amount of fresh pecans in the shells, cracked, which we bring home and shell and put in the freezer to make all kinds of delightful goodies for Thanksgiving and Christmas and other special days.

My motto is: “Anything good is even better with pecans.” Fudge is better with pecans in it. Brownies are better with pecans. Most cookies are better with pecans. Some cakes are great with pecans added. Salads are even better with a few chopped pecans to give them some crunch. We put pecans on top of our sweet potato casserole, and I like to add a few pecan halves to the top of a pumpkin pie to improve the looks and the taste.

Did you know?
1. The word “pecan” comes from the Algonquian Indian word “pakan” meaning “a hard-shelled nut.”
2. Pecans are native to the Americas and were a major source of food for several Indian tribes during the autumn.
3. Shelled pecans should be stored in the freezer in an airtight container. They’ll keep for about a year.
4. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both planted pecan trees in their gardens.
5. Pecans are nutritious, rich in calcium, phosphorus, iron, potassium, magnesium, thiamin, riboflavin, and niacin.
6. Pecans taste a lot better than walnuts. (IMHO)
7. The word “pecan” is pronounced “puCAHN,” not “PEEcan.” (In my not-so-humble opinion)

If you like pecans and have written something pecan-related on your blog, please leave a link in the Mr. Linky. I’ll be sending some fresh pecans to one lucky contributor at the end of November.

The key to good pecan pie is to use light Karo syrup. Dark is OK, too, but I prefer the look of the light syrup. And I use whole pecan halves, not chopped up ones.

You can go to this list for a large selection of pecan pie recipes at about.com.

From the Dallas Morning News, January 23, 1898 (via Wikipedia):

Texas Pecan Pie.
Tiaga, Grayson Co., Tex., Jan. 21.—(To The News.)—Knowing that The News is strictly for Texas and for Texas enterprises, and thinking that it might be of interest to many Texas kitchen queens, I herewith inclose you a copy of the recipe for making what I have decided to call in honor of the great Lone Star state, “The Texas Pecan Pie.”
Having never seen it in any paper or cook book I have read, and failing to find any one who had ever eaten it, I feel justified in claiming to be its originator and the right to christen it.
It is a most delicious pie–an instant favorite with all who have eaten it at my table. It is my desire that it may be added to the long list of delicacies Texas cooks are so greatly noted for preparing, and I want every lady to test its merits and I will be glad if they let me know of their success or failure in making it.
The Texas pecan pie—One cup sugar, one cup sweet milk, one-half cup pecan kernels chopped fine, three eggs, one tablespoonful flour. When cooked spread the well-beaten whites of two eggs on the top, brown and sprinkle a few of the chopped kernels over it. Above is for one pie.

Others claim that the pecan pie originated in New Orleans or that the Karo syrup people made it up or made it popular.

If you have anything to tell the world about pecans or pecan-related subjects, please write a post on your blog and leave a link here. (If you put the name of your post in parentheses after your name, I think people will be more likely to come over to visit.) I’ll be putting all the names of the contributors to Pecan Month, 2006 in a hat at the end of the month and drawing one name to receive a bag of fresh pecans sent straight from Texas to your home. Leave a link for Pecan Month, and go read about all the other folks who are praising God this month for creating pecans.

The first European to observe the use of pecan nuts was Cabeza de Vaca during the early 16th century: “They grind up some little grains with them [the nuts], two months of the year, without eating anything else, and even this they do not have every year, because one year they bear, and the next they do not. They [the nuts] are the size of those of Galicia and the trees are very large and there is a great number of them.” (Krieger 2002:189-190). In his account, Cabeza de Vaca uses the Spanish word for walnut (nueces), but the pecan is by far the most abundant nut-bearing tree in the region and the Spanish did not have a word for pecan at that time.

I got this information from a site called Texas Beyond History, but I already knew about Cabeza de Vaca, aka Mr. Cowhead, and the Indians and Esteban the slave. Year before last in our American history studies we read Walk the World’s Rim by Betty Baker. In fact, I read this book aloud to my older set about ten years ago, and some of them still remember it. Good old Esteban. And Chacko.

The book mentions nuts as a part of the Indians’ diet, but the indication in this fictional account of the exploration of Texas by de Vaca and his companions is that the Indians in South Texas subsisted mostly on roots and lizards. Chacko, a fictional Indian boy and the main character in the story, goes to Mexico City with Cabeza de Vaca and is amazed at the abundance of food the Spaniards are able to grow and produce and cook and eat.

Chacko should have given them a pecan tree to sort of even things up a bit.

If you have anything to say about pecans or nutcrackers or the price of pecans in China or anything else pecan-related, post it on your blog and leave a link here. November is Pecan Month at Semicolon. And I’m planning to send a bag of shelled pecans to the one blogger, of those who have left a link, whose name I draw at the end of the month.

A former Texan is growing pecans in Provence.

I wish him luck. As a pecan afficionado, I think pecans should be grown and sold around the world. However, they won’t grow up North where it’s too cold. This Aggie (Texas A & M) webpage says pecan trees are freeze-susceptible. I think that means a hard freeze is likely to kill your pecan tree. Pecans grow well in Texas, but in West Texas where I grew up you have to water your pecan tree if you want it to produce much fruit. It doesn’t freeze much in West Texas, but it also doesn’t rain.

You have to plant your pecan trees way in advance. Pecans don’t mature to the point of producing a good crop until about twenty years after they’re planted. So you can’t plant a tree in January and expect to have pecan pie for Christmas.

Pecans are being grown in Australia, Brazil, Israel, Mexico, Peru. and South Africa. Mexico is the only country in that list that produces a significant amount of pecans for sale.

So, tell us. Can you buy pecans in November where you live? How much do they cost?

This industrial strength nutcracker is available from Amazon. The review at Amazon says that this one doesn’t work so well.

My high school US history teacher invented a pecan cracker. As I remember it was a block of wood with a metal plate and different sized indentations in the surface to hold different sizes of nuts. Then, you had a hammer-like instrument with which you hit the pecan. It was supposed to shatter the shell and leave the nut whole, but it didn’t work for me. I think I hit my finger with the hammer-thing. I can’t find a picture of Mr. Barth’s nutcracker anywhere on the internet, so I’m guessing it didn’t go over too well with the general pecan-shelling public.

About the time my history teacher was using class time to show us his invention, the newest thing in nutcrackers was the “inertia nutcracker.” You sort of shoot the nut in an enclosed area (very unsportsmanlike), and the shell explodes off leaving the nutmeat –in theory.

The last picture shows the kind of nutcracker we used when I was a kid —minus the red rubber grips. I didn’t like it very much either. A brick or a rock and the sidewalk were more convenient and just as effective.

Nowadays I shell my own pecans, but I buy them cracked. The pecan grower or wholesaler has this big machine into which they dump the pecans, and the machine cracks the shells. All I have to do at home is to pull the shell off and enjoy the fruit inside. I could label my pecans: No household nutcrackers were used in the preparation of these tasty pecan treats —only fingers. I use nutcrackers for decoration.

P.S. I like Tschaikovsky’s Nutcracker music, but it’s way overdone this time of year. And I think the story of the ballet is scary, nightmare-inducing.

For more Works-for-me Wednesday links, visit Shannon at Rocks in my Dryer. (I wonder if she’s ever found any pecans in her dryer? I certainly have in mine.)