Overlooked and Underappreciated

by

Nicki Leone

[Author’s note: Yes, I know this is another cookbook review. What can I say? It’s winter. I spend a ridiculous amount of time in the kitchen cooking things in winter.]

When I first moved south, the little house I lived in had two distinctive attributes. One was a small flat front porch that faced a marsh creek. The other was a sixty-foot tall grey-barked tree that was late to leaf out in the spring and seemed to shade about an acre in the summer. Nothing grew under it but grass and its wide, slender, open branches swayed constantly in the wind. Late into the summer of my first year in that house I discovered exactly what that majestic tree was as the ground became littered with light green dirigible-shaped objects about two inches long. They were pecans, still in their wrappers, so to speak. For the next couple weeks I waged an all-out war with the squirrels over the spoils. For the next few weeks after the war was over (in the final tally, I think the squirrels probably won) I spent evenings patiently prying the pecans out of their casings, and then the nuts out of their shells.

Being a Yankee, it didn’t take me long to understand that what walnuts are to New England, pecans are to the South. They are what any recipe means when it says “add nuts.” And I discovered quickly that with the possible exception of double-chocolate brownies, I actually preferred the taste of pecans to walnuts in almost everything. They were sweeter, richer, milder, softer. They were better sprinkled across the top of my banana-nut muffins, better chopped mixed into my romaine-and-Romano cheese salads, better toasted and mixed in with my wild rice and cranberry side dishes. I always keep pecans on hand in the pantry. They are a staple because they so easily and quickly dress up almost any dish.  I miss quite a lot of the foods that I grew up with from my New England childhood—things for which there are just no good Southern substitute (rhubarb comes immediately and regretfully to mind). But thanks to pecans, I don’t miss walnuts at all.

June Jackson is in the opposite situation. She is a Southerner transplanted to the North (if you can call Maryland “north”) and she misses pecans something awful. So much so, that she wrote a book about them, In Praise of Pecans, which ended up as one of the finalists for Cookbook of the Year from the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance. I am not usually too enamored of single-ingredient cookbooks; I don’t tend towards the obsessive in my own kitchen and can’t often be convinced to indulge the obsessive natures of others. I don’t like to have eight different cookbooks out on the counter just to make dinner, so any book I take out had better have enough variety to cover all the bases—er, courses.

As intriguing as it may sound, you just can’t put together a decent meal from books like The Heinz Tomato Ketchup Cookbook (which I don’t own) or The Country Ham Cookbook (which I do, but which I haven’t opened in five years). But June Jackson can. She has 101 different ways to cook with pecans, a point she makes in the preface of the book when she recounts serving a dinner to friends that used pecans in every single dish. “You must really like pecans,” was one guest’s dry comment—although the author notes this person also ate more than anyone else. In upbeat fashion typical of the whole book, Jackson assumed she was being complimented.

As is common in cookbooks these days, In Praise of Pecans is part recipe book, part indulgent nostalgia. As is not so common, it has rather more of the former than the latter. After a brief chapter devoted to reminiscing of childhood days spent picking tiny pieces of nuts out of their shells (in what sounds like a blatant violation of child labor laws), or of her mother’s sure-fire recipe for pecan pralines—clipped out of a newspaper in 1928 and still used unchanged until a few days before she died more than eighty years later—Jackson leaves aside her own fond memories and concentrates on cajoling her readers into making their own.  She doesn’t have to cajole very hard, all she really has to do is let the flavor of the pecan speak for itself.

One might expect that the most enticing section of the book would be the dessert section, which opens, appropriately enough, with a recipe for Lula Mae’s Brown Sugar Pecan Pie that will make your teeth rot just to read it. And it is true that the desserts are pretty enticing. Who needs chocolate when you’ve got praline, caramel and divinity? My teeth hurt just looking at the pictures. But actually, my favorite part of the book is the middle part—the part with the salads, the entrees, and the side dishes. Mostly, I think, because there are recipes that use pecans in ways I never would have thought to try. Like the Chiles Rellenos en Nogada, which adds toasted pecans and pomegranate seeds to the stuffing in the peppers. Or the Pasta with Pecans, Asparagus and Lemon Zest, which took about thirty minutes to make and was absolutely delicious. There is also a great savory sweet potato pie that uses pecans and—of all things—broccoli. I promise it tastes much, much better than you’d think.

If the book suffers from anything, it is a certain excess of enthusiasm on the part of the author, whom I’m sure would insist that pecans cured cancer if she could get away with it. In fact, she sort of implies it in the very last section of the book before the index, called, somewhat cutely, “How Do Pecans Love You, with Apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning.” The reader and cook both will be relieved to know that this is not an attempt to extol the virtues of the pecan in sonnet form. It is, however, a (rather unconvincing) list of health facts as to why a “pecan diet” is so very, very good for you. A pecan diet may be, but a Southern diet never will, so knowing that pecans are a good source of the B vitamins thiamin, riboflavin, and niacin is not as convincing an enticement as knowing how they taste in pancakes.

In the end  there are only so many ways you can cook with any nut—you can toast them, candy them, grind them up into flour, or chop them into bits and add them to things. And there are recipes in Jackson’s book in which pecans seem almost incidental, rather than central, to the dish. Adding chopped pecans as an accompaniment to a 50s-style “wedge of lettuce” seems like a good way to dress up a boring dish, but hardly worth including as a “pecan recipe.” The author’s own evangelizing does tend to make her get carried away: “When taken into consideration the money that is spent promoting raisins, it becomes clear that, with a portion of that advertising budget, pecans would move to the forefront of global use. While raisins are fairly nutritious, pecans are way out front in most nutritive elements, adding almost no sugar to the diet.”

There is a Holy Roller tone here that I’m more used to hearing at church than in my kitchen. I’m not sure why the author has it in for raisins, but it may comfort her to know that the massive budget that went into creating those dancing California raisins creeped me out completely. I actively avoided raisins for years on the strength of their shrill little voices and weird spindly legs. Still, despite (or perhaps because of) its many eccentricities, there  is no question that In Praise of Pecans will make you realize the untapped potential of what the author believes is of a sadly overlooked nut.

Books mentioned in this column:
In Praise of Pecans by June Jackson (Bright Sky Press, 2008)

The Country Ham Book by Jeanne Voltz (University of North Carolina Press, 1999)

The Heinz Tomato Ketchup Cookbook by Paul Hartley (Ten Speed Press, 2008)


Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.