FOOD SPECIAL ...........PECANS The Nut Job

PECANS The Nut Job 

Why Pecans can be extremely rich, yet luxuriously restrained

There is a short film that can be found on YouTube called ‘Pecan Pie’. It is directed by Michel Gondry, the quirky director of that comedy of romance and memory loss Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (it came as an extra on this DVD). It stars that film’s hero Jim Carrey who is simply shown driving around in a bed that happens to have wheels and an engine, and all the while he is grinning and laughing in that manic Carrey way and singing “Pecan Pie! Pecan Pie!”
    That is it and it would seem just meant to be surreal and meaningless until it occurred to me that it was a quite plausible depiction of the mental status of intense, almost indescribable joy of someone who has just indulged in a lot of pecan pie. This is an American dessert made by putting pecans in a pastry case, bathing them in a rich custard of butter, brown sugar, salt, golden syrup, vanilla essence (or whisky) and eggs all melted together, and then baking it till the custard is just set and the pastry done.
    This is very easy to make if you use readymade pastry, and very useful for those awkward times when guests arrive before you have finished cooking. I have made pecan pie while chatting to guests, easily using the same whisky I pour for them to pour into the pie. A better pie could be made, of course, with more care and a detailed recipe, but any shortcomings always get overlooked because a pecan pie is so drop dead delicious that your guests will all be swooning and in no condition to look for faults.
    This may not seem so at first. Pecan pies don’t have the homely appeal of apple pies, the smooth spiciness of pumpkin pie, the contrasting flavours of lemon curd pie or the tangy-sweet exuberance of pies made with peaches, plums, cherries and other fruit. Nut pies, in general, can be too dense, chewy, cloyingly rich (almond) or strongly flavoured (walnut) unless mixed with dried fruit. When you take your first bite of pecan pie you are already dubious and at first it seems too subdued to have much taste.
    And then it hits you: an intense, overwhelming rush of deep deliciousness with that initial restraint adding a touch of luxury; other pies may try too hard, but pecan pie has an aristocratic awareness of its superior quality. All that butter, sugar and syrup is so rich it could become a bit sickening, but this is when the salt, which is often added as large sea salt crystals so that they don’t entirely dissolve, kick in with bursts of flavour contrast and the alcohol helps to add a lightening touch.
    But mostly it is the pecans, nuts which manage to be both extremely rich, yet luxuriously restrained. We are sadly not familiar with them in India, though they have started making an appearance with the larger sellers of nuts and dried fruit. I have seen them described as chota akhrot which is hardly accurate since they are often larger, or more accurately, longer, than walnuts (akhrot). Americani akhrot might be a better term since they are part of the Juglandaceae, broadly called the walnut family of trees, but where real walnuts are Old World trees, pecans comes from hickory trees, their New World cousins.
    The edible parts of pecans resemble walnuts too in having the same brain-like ridges and lobes, but they have an attractive red-brown colour and are more streamlined and smooth. The shell is smooth too, “a walnut in a torpedo,” Edward Bunyard describes them in his book The Anatomy of Dessert. Bunyard is a rather snobbish writer and it is characteristic that he praises pecans only after generally disparaging American produce: “Their Apples we can excel; Spain can hold their Oranges at bay; their Peaches are quite fortunately unexportable; but the one nut their country has originated is at its best excellent.” The taste may seem similar to walnuts at first, but they never have the bitter edge that walnuts often have, but just a faint woodiness that perfectly highlights their fine flavour, with a lovely lingering richness.
    Pecans come from the Southern parts of the USA and states like Georgia and Texas (where it is the official state tree) grow most of the world’s crop. Outside the US and Mexico, where they are native, they have now been planted in a few other places, like South Africa, where they are having the happy effect of pecan pie displacing their common dessert, a boring custard pie called melktart. I have a standing order with friends going to South Africa or the US to bring back pecans. At a time when most food items are available in India, pecans remain worth getting back from abroad simply because of their prohibitive cost here – Rs2000 a kilo with the larger sellers, while in a gourmet supermarket I recently found 100 gms on sale for Rs500, a truly mind-boggling mark-up.
    Even abroad though pecans are expensive simply because they are in short supply. Pecans take time to grow, though then they could bear for up to 300 years. They are tricky to grow, since they do not self fertilise, so you need different types growing together and the results can be unpredictable. For this reason until the 1880s pecans were not properly cultivated, but just harvested from trees that had grown by themselves. Now the system of cultivation has been cracked and Nut Fruits for the Himalayas, a book authored by ML Dewan, MC Nauityal and VK Seth, seems to suggest that pecan plantings have happened in the hills in India, but this is probably likely to be only on a small scale and sadly unlikely to make a difference to market prices (but if any reader can confirm about these Indian pecans and how to get them I would be very grateful if they email me).
Pecan prices are reaching such levels that farmers in the US are reporting a spate of pecan thefts. They are, in some ways, an ideal target since they are high value, not hard to transport and can be kept in storage without spoiling, unlike most produce. Still, considering that their areas of cultivation are among the most gun-toting in the US it is some measure of the rewards involved that the thieves are willing to take the risks. It would be nice to think that this demand is going to result in more cultivation, but I can also see farmers calculating that given the long growth time frames involved and the high prices they are getting now it makes sense to keep cultivation at current levels, and just put more security.
    Pecans can be used for more than just pie, of course, but I feel this is a waste. Because they are subtler than other nuts, their flavour is easily swamped. They then only leave a background rich taste, and that might be fine if we weren’t paying so much – at these prices I want to appreciate my pecans in full and for themselves. They can be toasted and salted for an elegant snack, candied and eaten by themselves or added as a contrast in salads, used with savoury meats, particularly as a stuffing for roast chicken or turkey and the American Indian tribes who valued pecans as a vital food source would soak, grind and squeeze them to get a nut milk which was the only milk like substance in the Americas till European settlers bought milk cattle. All this would be great if I could get enough pecans, but since that seems unlikely all those that I get will be reserved exclusively for pecan pie!

Vikram Doctor CDET130809