Pecan promise

Despite a sparse harvest, a Yankee transplant vows to produce a homemade pie for the men in her life

By today, we'll know whether our pitiful pecan harvest rendered enough nuts to make a single pie.

My father has been waiting for this pie for more than a year.

My mother, a fabulous cook, hates cooked fruit, a fact that has resulted in an all-out pie ban in her kitchen. My parents will have driven down from Connecticut (10 hours, without traffic) for the first time for Thanksgiving. Of course, they came to spend time with us, but still -- my dad was promised a pie.

I fear we may have misled my father, and ourselves, about what this year's pecan harvest would yield.

When we bought our little brick house in Durham's Northgate Park last summer, the two grand pecan trees in the front yard, one male and one female, were a pleasant bonus in an older, established neighborhood. They were a reminder that this neighborhood was once rural, and we silently thanked the man who built this home in 1953 for having the foresight to plant them.

The previous owners said that every other year brought a bumper crop. We were not ready for the hundreds of nuts that fell on our lawn last October. I called upon some neighborhood children to help get the nuts off the damp ground. We filled what seemed like every non-cereal bowl in the house.

Since we had more than we knew what to do with last year, we figured we would still have plenty during an "off" season. Little did we know we would spend this fall fighting a losing battle against the squirrels. When it became clear there would be only a fraction of last year's pecans this year, my husband began a nightly scavenge when he got home from work. I checked in the mornings. There is one pathetic pile of nuts on my dining room table, mocking us every night at dinner.

This is unfortunate, for not only did I promise a pie, I also have a year of pecan tutelage under my belt. As Yankees, we did not know what to do with those pecans last year other than shell them and look for pie recipes.

And shelling them was horrific. My husband and I bloodied our fingertips peeling away the rock-hard shells using a basic nutcracker. Maybe one in 20 came out in one piece. My understanding of the price discrepancy between whole pecans and pecan pieces became quite clear.

With the promise of a pie, my father bought us a special pecan cracker for this year's harvest.

My spending this much energy harvesting nuts was all fairly ironic considering that not too long ago, I was very anti-pecan. I was scarred by a less than impressive first taste of pecan pie during high school. It was part of a dessert buffet at a catered Thanksgiving dinner. One bite and I knew the room left in my stomach was better spent on something else.

Purist's progress

When we moved to the South a few years ago, my husband, a consummate pie lover, asked me to bake a pecan pie. Using candied pecans, I found the dessert acceptable, and my husband devoured the pie.

Being a purist, he thought he would like it even more with regular pecans. I acquiesced, though I still prefer the candied version.

Much of my pecan education came from Frances Mayes, author of "Under the Tuscan Sun." As her personal assistant, I helped her prepare for Thanksgiving last year.

Being in her kitchen around the holidays means munching on salty, butter-roasted pecans, best eaten with a (Diet) Coke. She makes loads of them every year to last through Christmas, and I was an instant convert upon the first buttery bite.

Mayes, a native Georgian, makes an annual pecan order around this time that lasts the whole year. She usually buys 10 pounds of pecans, halves and pieces, from the same supplier in Florida she has used for ages. She even had them shipped to California before moving to Durham three years ago.

She freezes the nuts as soon as they arrive to keep them fresh. We never froze any of ours last year, opting instead to give them away or bake them immediately.

According to Mayes, store-bought pecans are often not as good as ones straight from a supplier. Depending on what our own nuts look like when we've shelled them, today may find me resorting to store-bought pecans to supplement the pitiful harvest. Sorry, Dad.

So who knows what sort of pecan pie we'll be dining on this afternoon?

Either way, there will be a homemade, if not home-grown, pecan pie for my father and my husband. And while pecan pie is not my favorite, it is slowly but surely becoming a Thanksgiving tradition.

There is something very special about using food you've picked from your own property. And it's romantic, and oh so Southern, to have pecans in our yard. Unfortunately, the squirrels agree.

Recipes

Roasted Pecans