In the latest Photos thread there was a link to this older thread which had to do with M&M battles to determine the stronger M. Since that is too old a thread to reply to, I thought I could start a new one with what I would have said there and add a few additional points for variety.
I spent my first 11 years in a moderate sized town in Alabama in a two-story rented house that had six or seven pecan trees on the lot. Every fall my brother and I would sit in the yard and eat pecans for literally hours. We had this contest sort of thing similar to the M&M battles in that old thread, where we’d use two pecans to crack one another, until we were too tired (or full – usually too tired since if you spent the time to crack, hull and remove the bitters, eating one pecan would take a minute or so and you’d use up a good portion of the consumed calories getting the next one ready to eat) then we’d have a battle with our two “champs.”
In better than half the cases, the “champ” would be rotten! I never could understand that.
Now, as to pecans:
How do you pronounce that word? For me and everyone I know, its Pee-KAHN, and not Pee-CAN or PEE-can or some other way of saying it.
Is there any better-tasting nut? I like cashews, filberts, pistachios, boiled peanuts, almonds and macadamias. I can tolerate Brazil nuts, walnuts, sunflower seeds, pine nuts, and most any other nut I can think of. But pecans are the main ones for me.
What dishes or foodstuffs are good only if they have pecans as opposed to some other nut? Pecan pie, GooGoo candy, pralines, apple-and-pecan salad, etc.
I can’t really discern a lot of difference between pecans (pee-can to me) and walnuts (OK, they are different, but rather similar - not all that surprising as they are closely related); they’re nice, but not my favourite.
I like brazil nuts and coconuts best, also cashews and peanuts. Hazelnuts are OK if they’ve not been stored too long. Chestnuts are great baked. Pine nuts? Meh. Macadamias? Bleh - like eating chalk.
Mmmmmm, pecans. Food of the gods. I’ve alwasy loved pecans but never bought them because my mother had me convinced that they were too “expensive” and only to be bought for company. But I just (like last year) realized that, goshdarnit, I’m over 35 now and make good money and I can buy a whole bag of pecans just for me…
BTW, I also say “pee-KAHN”, the proper Southern pronunciation.
puh-kahn here, I have several large puh-kahn trees in my yard. I also have several colonies of squirrels. I have to buy any puh-kahns I eat, the squirrels harvest them while they are still green.
We never had squirrels until maybe 10~15 years ago. Used to have volunteer trees pop up all over the yard from nuts gone to seed, not anymore.
1) How do you pronounce that word? For me and everyone I know, its Pee-KAHN, and not Pee-CAN or PEE-can or some other way of saying it.
I say “p’KAHN”
**2) Is there any better-tasting nut? ** Ummm, NO. Especially if they’re just roasted and salted.
3) What dishes or foodstuffs are good only if they have pecans as opposed to some other nut?Magic Cookie Bars are yummy. As a rule, I substitute pecans when a recipe calls for walnuts. Walnuts taste like ass.
4) Do you have any wonderful pecan stories or tales? Not really. But have you noticed that the Deluxe Mixed Nuts in a can have fewer pecans than the other types of nuts? I literally dig those out first so no one else can have them! MINE! ALL MINE!!
Blue Bell makes an ice cream called Pecans Pralines ‘n’ Cream. I highly recommend it. Buttered pecan ice cream is also good.
I have a pecan tree in my yard, but like Duke of Rat, I must buy my pecans if I want to eat any, on account of those dratted squirrels eating all of MY pecans!
I’m fond of most all nuts, but pecans and cashews are my favorites. I sent my father his traditional gift of nuts for Father’s Day. He knows that he can count on his eldest daughter to send him cashews or a nut mix containing cashews for almost all holidays. He says that this is a sign that I’ve been raised right.
Our nearest p’kahn grove is being cut down for yet another strip mall. We are in mourning.
Best pecan pie recipe - modified, feel free to drool.
FAMOUS PECAN PIE
· 9-inch unbaked pie crust
· 1 cup light corn syrup
· 1 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
· 3 eggs, slightly beaten
· 1/3 cup butter, melted
· 1/2 teaspoon salt
· 1 teaspoon vanilla
· 1 tablespoon good bourbon
· 1 1/2 cup pecan halves
Heat oven to 350 degrees.
In a large bowl, combine corn syrup, sugar, eggs, butter, salt, bourbon and vanilla; mix well. Pour into unbaked pie crust; sprinkle with pecan halves.
Bake at 350 degrees for 45 to 50 minutes or until center is set. (Toothpick inserted in center will come out clean when pie is done.) Cool. If crust or pie appears to be getting too brown, cover with foil for the remaining baking time.
You can top it with a bit of whipped cream, but even plain, nothing tops this!
TIP: The original recipe stated that the pie should be baked 45 to 50 minutes in a preheated 350-degree gas oven. If an electric oven is used, it may be necessary to add 15 to 20 minutes to the baking time. (Begin testing the pie with a toothpick after 45 minutes.)
I heart pecans (usually pronounced puh-KAHN, but sometimes for reasons that are unclear, pronounced PEE-can). I grew up around pecan trees. I know what you mean about using pecans to crack other pecans, although I think we usually just used 2 nuts: the crack-er and the crack-ee. You could pull in a third nut if you had a tough one. They are the yummiest nuts for sure. Pecan meal (available here at Whole Foods) is very good for making nut pancakes (egg, nut meal, and salt, fried in oil).
Pecan tree stories: There was a pecan tree in the back yard of the house I grew up in. There was one branch that hung down that my brother and I could grab and use to climb up to get to the upper parts of the tree. There was another small pecan tree in my grandmother’s house across the street. I used to climb up in it and read books. (I was big on climbing into trees to read when I was a kid.)
There’s another great big honking pecan tree by my dad’s house. It’s bloody huge. It doesn’t produce many pecans anymore, though.
My brother and I used to hone our bb gun skills by shooting pecans out of these trees. We were actually pretty good at it.
In the fall, you could have fun by throwing a football or other such object up into the tree to knock down pecans that hadn’t fallen yet.
My grandfather made a pecan-picker-upper. This allowed him to go around and gather pecans without all that tedious bending and stooping to pick them up.
There are lots of pecan groves in the part of Georgia where I grew up. Whenever I see one, I feel like I’m on home turf.
How funny to find a pecan thread today, after finding this photo this morning. It’s not too far from where I live but I never knew it was there. I’ll let you guess what type of orchards those are.
They are PEE-cans to me, although I’ve heard puh-CANS and puh-KAHNS all my life as well.
[Tidbit] It’s from an old Indian (Native American) word which, IIRC, gave more or less equal weight to both syllables. It’s not French, English, or Latin in origin so pronunciation rules derived from such languages don’t apply, except perhaps for English on the grounds that it’s now an English word.[/Tidbit]
Yes, there’s a tastier nut but you have to work much longer and harder to get it: the black walnut.
I knew I had left one out when I made that initial list of nuts I like. It’s mostly because they’re hard to find and even harder to get at. That would be what folks around here call Scalybarks. They’re hickory nuts from the Scalybark (some may say Shagbark although they’re separate varieties) Hickory.
A tough nut to crack and even harder to get the meat out with having it break to pieces. I ate a hatful one day using a nutcracker to get at them and for once found a better tasting nut than old Alabama pecans.
I call them PEE-CANS (non- US doper) - one of my pet peeves has to be ordering Butter Pecan ice-cream from a Baskin Robbins - invariably the server will stand there staring at me before saying patronisingly 'Oh, you mean Butter P’KHAN…" Well, no I don’t, a) I do mean Butter Pecan as that’s how I was taught to say it and b) you know jolly well that’s what I mean, so just scoop it up and don’t try to correct me. Hrmph.
If your squirrels are anything like ours were around New Orleans, your neighbors are probably getting a bunch of those nuts. We didn’t have a pecan tree in our yard but we had lots of pecans anyway, they were dropped by passing squirrels.
To me and most of my south Georgia friends and family, they’re pee-cans, with no particular emphasis on either syllable. I guess, if AHunter3 is correct, then so are we – yippee!
Until I was grown and living in the city, I had no idea that pecans were expensive (nor honey, muscadines, blueberries, or blackberries, for that matter. They were all freely available when I was growing up on a farm.) The first time I got a yen for pecan tassies and went to the store for ingredients, I nearly swallowed my teeth over the price.
My favorite pecan-related memory is sitting by the fire with Granddaddy and shelling pecans. I probably wasn’t much help, but Granddaddy would pick out as many as I wanted to eat, and then make buttery toasted pecans after we had a panful. Yummm.
Since pecans were generally so plentiful around these parts, virtually all of my family’s dessert (and a lot of non-dessert) recipes include them. Two of the best are pecan tassies (a pecan pie type of pastry, with cream cheese crust,) and plain old pecan pie. My pecan pie recipe includes only real butter, sugar, eggs, Karo syrup, vanilla, salt, and pecans – simply and sinfully delicious, in an artery-clogging sort of way. The tassies are a lot more labor intensive, what with pressing the cream cheese pastry into mini tins, but worth the effort.