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    Pecans: a Savor the South cookbook
    Pecans: a Savor the South cookbook
    Pecans: a Savor the South cookbook
    Ebook115 pages1 hour

    Pecans: a Savor the South cookbook

    By Kathleen Purvis

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Show me a recipe with pecans, and I have to try it." Attributing her own love of this American nut to the state of her birth--Georgia is the nation's leader in growing pecans--and to the happy fact that her mother "hardly made a cookie, candy, or pan of Sunday dressing without them," Kathleen Purvis teaches readers how to find, store, cook, and completely enjoy this southern delicacy. Pecans includes fifty-two recipes, ranging from traditional to inventive, from uniquely southern to distinctly international, including Bourbon-Orange Pecans, Buttermilk-Pecan Chicken, Pecan Pralines, and Leche Quemada.
    In addition to the recipes, Purvis delights readers with the pecan's culinary history and its intimate connections with southern culture and foodways. Headnotes for the recipes offer humorous personal stories as well as preparation tips such as how to choose accompanying cheeses.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe University of North Carolina Press
    Release dateSep 10, 2012
    ISBN9780807837474
    Pecans: a Savor the South cookbook
    Author

    Kathleen Purvis

    Kathleen Purvis is an award-winning food writer, food editor for the Charlotte Observer, and the author of two cookbooks, Bourbon and Pecans.

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      Book preview

      Pecans - Kathleen Purvis

      Introduction

      I keep my pecans in the freezer.

      Yes, they last longer there, where the cold protects their rich oils and buttery texture. But the freezer doesn’t just save my pecans from age.

      It saves my pecans from me.

      That’s the idea, anyway. The truth is, I can’t resist pecans. Never could. Put pecans in any dish, and I will crave it. Show me a recipe with pecans, and I have to try it. Put a bag of shelled pecans in my kitchen, and I will make excuses to dip into it every time it catches my eye.

      Freezing them doesn’t actually stop me from eating them. The little devils don’t freeze hard, so even frozen, they’re easy to eat. (Icy pecans mixed with a few dark chocolate morsels are even better, giving the chocolate a satisfying crunch. But perhaps I shouldn’t put that idea in your head.) Still, hiding my pecans in the freezer at least slows me down a little.

      My Georgia origins may be to blame for my inability to say no to a pecan. The state where I was born is still the nation’s leader in growing pecans. Pecans and I both have deep roots in that red clay. Although I have lived all over the South, including eastern North Carolina and several parts of Florida, I was born in Georgia (Columbus) to a Georgia mother (Atlanta) and a Georgia father (Americus) with a hundred years of Georgians behind us.

      With that background, we always had pecans in our house. My mother hardly made a cookie, candy, or pan of Sunday dressing without them. My grandmother’s best recipes included them. It’s hard to remember any occasion, from a picnic to a cocktail hour to a postfuneral spread, when pecans didn’t turn up somewhere, mixed in the chicken salad, embedded in the cheese ball, sprinkled on the casserole, or just buttered, salted, and put out by the bowlful.

      Family car trips in the summer always included a stop at a Stuckey’s, where we’d beg for a pecan log. At the holidays, piles of pecans went into my grandmother’s special Nibble Mix, which she packed in empty coffee cans and mailed to family and friends scattered all over the South. Pecans in their woody shells filled the special bowl with the nutcracker that was always somewhere near my dad’s TV chair in the winter.

      On a shelf in my kitchen today, I have a black cast-iron nutcracker shaped like a dog, a replica of one that my mother remembers from her grandfather’s desk. As a child, if she was good, she was allowed to put a pecan in the dog’s jaws and pull down its tail to crack the nut.

      For all my love of pecans, I sometimes hesitate to say the word. As a native of South Georgia, my father said pee-can, a pronunciation that drew sniffs of disapproval from my mother, who would point out that a pee-can is something you keep under the bed. She grew up in more urbane Atlanta, where the nut was a pah-cahn. No matter which way I said it, I could expect a rebuke from the other parent. By the time I was an adult, I had developed my own eccentric pronunciation, pee-cahn.

      When I began work on this book, I knew I was going to need a whopping amount of nuts. I went online and tracked down a good price from the Gilbert Pecan Company in Texas.

      Georgia may be number 1 in pecan production, but Texas runs a close second. (New Mexico is creeping up there, too.)

      After a phone chat with a very nice lady, I put in an order for thirty pounds of pecans. A few days later, a large cardboard box arrived on my doorstep. My husband and I hefted it onto the dining room table, slit open the tape, pulled back the flaps, and found ourselves gazing at the largest number of pecans we had ever seen at one time. They weren’t bagged, just poured straight into the box, right up to the top.

      As I grabbed my storage bags and went to work with a scale, I began to notice a heavenly scent. Even raw, that many pecans massed together have a distinct aroma. As I scooped, weighed, and bagged, I contemplated whether pecans actually smell like caramel, or whether so many things made with pecans include brown sugar that I associate their smell with caramel.

      Whichever it is, if you ever get a chance to go face-down in thirty pounds of pecans, give a good sniff and let me know what you think.

      What’s a Pecan?

      My favorite pecan story happened on my very first trip to New York City, the week before Thanksgiving in 1987, when I went up for a long weekend with my friend Kathy.

      An early brutal cold snap hit the city, but we were young and city-struck enough that we didn’t care. The fact that it was too cold to be outside just gave us an excuse to spend more time inside shopping, and we quickly headed for Macy’s.

      This was long before food-shopping wonderments like Eataly and the Chelsea Market. I hadn’t yet seen the food halls at Harrods in London or trolled the cheese stalls of the Rue Mouffetard in Paris. That first experience in the Macy’s basement was the closest thing to gourmet heaven I had ever seen.

      While I wandered through aisles stocked with more

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