June Jackson

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...read more… (mais)