Cracking the secrets of the Pecan People

My friends love fall for football, hunting and the return of pleasant weather. I appreciate all of these but have another secret passion for fall: it’s the season of pecans.

It’s been that way for a number of years, ever since we built a new house on a quiet, shady boulevard that had once been someone’s pecan orchard, with acres of tall, thin, elephant-gray tree trunks planted in military rows. It was surely a configuration that made landscape architects shudder as the grove was split into lots, then developed with houses and gardens. Save one.

We bought the last remaining lot, refugees from a subdivision where we had been allotted a single gumball tree, and built a house, moving under the pecan trees in late summer and blissfully unaware that we had entered the domain of the Pecan People.

They arrived in swarms when the first signs of autumn struck, in cars of every vintage, pickup trucks, on bikes and on foot. Black and white, old and young, they were all animated by an obvious sense of tradition about our street in general and our lot in particular. The more senior of them were characterized by loose-fitting clothing and a bag attached to one hand, walking that purposeful walk I came to know: eyes fixed on the ground, punctuated by a downward dart every so often. At first, we peered from behind the shaded front windows and laughed at the crazy Pecan People.

They were clearly frustrated to discover that someone had erected a house in their absence, that this previously public picking ground was not only now private but had been diminished by the three trees we cut down to build the house. The more resigned among them picked their way along the boulevard’s median, plucking nuts from under joggers’ feet, even from the street as oncoming cars threatened to reduce wayward nuts to pecan crunch. The more aggressive, however, stole furtive glances towards our house then ran up in the yard to gather what they could. It didn’t take long before, strictly in self-defense, I began combing my yard several times a day for our pecans.

So pecanning really began for me as a convenient pastime. In the peak of the season, however, it was almost impossible not to pecan. Even the driveway was cobbled with nuts. The children and I learned never to leave the house without an empty container. We went to fetch the morning paper, weed the garden and wait for the school bus with a paper sack or bucket in hand.

Before long, I noticed that some of our neighbors, longtime residents of the street, poked about their yards with a mechanical picker—a shaft with a spring-operated box on the bottom. I was envious, but after I learned how fattening pecans are (740 calories in a cup of pecan meats, although they’re also a good source of protein and unsaturated fats), I decided that I needed the exercise of bending over and picking them up more than the fancy contraption.

At the height of the season, the ground was so littered with little nuts that it became a real effort to keep bending over. So I devised a Rule of Pecanning: only bend in a spot where you can pick up 10 pecans without moving. This led to the development of a new exercise, the Pecan Wiggle, which is a short cut between 10-pecan patches in which I retained the squat position and duck-walked to the next (hopefully nearby) spot. I noticed that when I Pecan-Wiggled in the front yard, the Pecan People on the median all watched with great interest—although I never saw any of them try it.

Before I lived under pecan trees, I thought that a pecan was a pecan was a pecan. But no. Our trees produce several varieties that are easily distinguished one from other. Some are long and almost cylindrical; some are very round with distinguished black stripes; others are buff-colored and shaped like mini-footballs. One species of tree produces its crop all at once in a several-day shower of pelting nuts that made us consider investing in protective helmets; others are steady and dependable, dropping a continuous supply throughout the season—early October through November. And I learned by living there that the crop varies year to year.

One day, my children happened to notice that a neighbor’s trees produced a different species than ours that were much larger. Larger, of course, translated as better, and they began sneaking off to the neighbor’s yard when they thought I wasn’t looking. “You’re behaving just like the Pecan People,” I hissed, and reeled them home.

It didn’t take long before we had collected so many brown paper bags full of nuts that I realized we were compelled to take some time out for shelling. For many years, I’d been the recipient of a gift tin of shelled pecan halves sent by a kindly aunt. After I moved into the pecan grove, I realized I hadn’t been grateful enough: the ancient art of pecan shelling has few gifted practitioners.

We were not among them.

In our possession were two old-fashioned nutcrackers, including an ornate antique silver one in my great-grandmother’s pattern, and two silver nut picks. But it didn’t take long to realize that creating two perfect, unshelled halves from a whole pecan required skills we didn’t have. After the first week, I was the proud owner of a lifetime supply of pecan granules.

At the same time, since pecans were taking over my life, I was compelled to research our nuts, just in case there was a game I didn’t know about called Pecan Trivia. So I learned that in the Algonquin Native American language, “pecan” meant “requiring a stone to crack”; that pecans were indigenous only to North America; and that 17th-Century French missionaries named them Carya illinoesis—Illinois hickory—because they first encountered them in the Illinois territory, even though they’re more prevalent in the South. I learned that Thomas Jefferson planted a grove of them at Monticello and gave some trees to George Washington for his estate at Mount Vernon, and that, best of all, in the 1840s, a clever but unknown slave at Oak Alley Plantation, on the Mississippi River not far from Baton Rouge where I live, had developed more than 100 varieties of pecans. I couldn’t wait for a conversation that demanded a couple of these interesting facts.

The intellectual pursuit of pecan facts was a counterpoint to shelling, which took up an inordinate amount of spare time. It was so tedious, in fact, that to entertain myself I devised a psychological study in which I evaluated the responses of anyone who happened by while I was shelling pecans. Reactions fell into four categories: A. Ignore what I am doing and sit down to visit. B. Offer to help and eat most of what they pick. C. Help with such intensity that I suspect them of being a closet Pecan Person. D. Help energetically, but complain that I need new equipment.

Our inaugural pecan season lasted until just before Thanksgiving. Much before the current trend of folks trying to eat fresh, eat local or grow their own, I decided we must share the fruits of our labors at the traditional family gathering at my house. I made pecan pies and pecan pralines, and I even threw a few pecans into the cornbread dressing. Feeling smug and accomplished, I remarked to the 20 hungry pilgrims that every pecan they encountered was from our yard: we’d gathered them, shelled them and cooked them up ourselves.

But my expectations were too high: some sympathy for my leg muscles, still sore from the Pecan Wiggle, and for my fingers, contorted and nearly arthritic from shelling, or perhaps a bit of empathy over the dramatic case of poison ivy I’d contracted while ferreting out renegade pecans from the underbrush. Or merely gratitude for the long hours we’d spent in our various pecanning rituals. My happy circle of relatives, however, oblivious to everything, consumed the goodies as casually as if they’d arrived on my doorstep compliments of UPS.

It was then that I realized the awful truth: that no one appreciates pecans and the rites involved with these noble nuts quite as much as those who have joined the exclusive fall circle called the Pecan People. And I had become one.

Many years later, I still am. Even now, after moving to another house where a lonely live oak tree graces my small yard, I can feel my nose begin twitching when hints of cool weather appear. I walk my neighborhood or drive along city streets, aware that I am more vigilant than usual; I am searching for pecan trees.

It’s preferable if their branches overhang a public access, but I’ve occasionally succumbed to the need to scurry into someone’s front yard to pick up just a few. Usually, before I get the urge to do the Pecan Wiggle, I remember that the half-gallon tin of shelled pecans ordered over the Internet is at home in my freezer.

But to a Pecan Person, it’s just not the same.