The Pecan

by James McWilliams

  Once acquired by Indians, pecans enjoyed a couple of key advantages over other foraged foods. For one thing, they did not have to be consumed in their entirety all at once. This was not the case for animal meat, which was perishable (unless it was jerked or smoked—both quite labor-intensive tasks and, as a result, infrequently undertaken). There are many accounts of Indians fresh off an extended hunt gorging themselves on weeks’ worth of animal flesh before it perished. Nuts, which had the additional benefit of requiring minimal processing, could be harvested and stored for months, if not years. Indians did not have to gorge on pecans for the sole purpose of not wasting them.

  Storage, however, was considered serious business. Nuts had to be secreted in places where rodents and mammals could not penetrate—as they were much better at raiding human stash than humans were at raiding animal stash. Many cultures relied on capacious earthen pits, rock shelters, and caves. Archaeologists have unearthed human-secreted pecan remains dating as far back as 6700 BC. Evidence has been scraped out of Baker Cave in Texas, the Cope Site in Louisiana, and Modoc Rock Shelter in Illinois. Pecans stored well, and Indians would usually take up to two months to deplete their reserves. They could have taken longer had they so wished. The pecan can be kept in a dry, cool place (at about 47 degrees Fahrenheit) for as long as a year without drying out. Some have speculated that Indians may have stored nuts in the hollowed-out trunks of pecan trees, noting that squirrels keep upwards of 45 kilograms of nuts in such natural cubbies.18

  Nuts had the further advantage of having a superb energy cost/benefit ratio. In a land-rich but labor-poor environment, this asset may have been the greatest as far as the Indians were concerned. Modern estimates suggest that it would have been possible for a single Indian to harvest 6.2 kilograms of nuts per hour. Armed with hammer stones and a properly chosen rock surface, it takes an individual about an hour to extract 66 grams of meat, a volume that amounts to about 450 kilocalories of food energy. Scaling up these figures places matters in eye-opening perspective. According to one estimate, the average harvest of native pecans from Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana would have been 10,138,336 kilograms of nut meat per annual masting. This amount of calories, if harvested, would have been equivalent in weight to the meat of 17,000 to 25,600 bison! Evaluating these numbers, Texas botanist Grant Hall writes, “Where a bison with a body weight of 476 kg was shown to have edible parts with a food energy value of 453,000 kcal, an average native pecan native nut harvest would be equivalent in food value to upwards of 150,000 bison.”19

  As is so often the case when we try to probe cultures that left no written record, we tend to be left with more questions than answers. Did pre-contact Indians turn pecan harvests into social events? Did they pioneer any especially ingenious methods of dealing with crows and squirrels? Did they develop ceremonies or rituals that involved pecans? Did they enjoy the taste of these buttery nuts or was it all about energy? Did they have special pecan recipes? Elusive questions, all of them. What we do know, however, is important, and worth reiterating. We know that Indians developed an early form of human mutualism with pecan trees. They had no need to harvest pecan wood, so pecan trees were never systematically removed from the landscape—as were, say, pines for hunting and firewood, and the osage orange for bow making. Because Indians found the pecan’s seeds to be the most valuable aspect of the tree, and the densest plant food around, they formed their diets, migratory patterns, and trading networks around the tree’s bounty, haphazard as the masting may have been. In so doing, they helped pecans proliferate as they increasingly enjoyed a food source that was rich in nutrients, relatively easy to access, and seamlessly adaptable to the changing natural environment of the American South.

  If the pre-contact period remains a relative black hole of information, one small but telling request, made hundreds of years after contact, leaves us with some concrete sense of the pecan’s lasting place in Native American material and cultural life. The request came from the tribal government of the Chickasaw Nation, which included in its new constitution a choice stipulation, one of only a handful of requests, and thus one that surely meant a lot to them as a culture precariously clinging to its identity. It demanded “an act against the destroying of pecan trees.” As we will see, this request, even after European contact, was, however improbably, honored in the breach by white men whose relationship with the environment turned out to follow radically different rules.20

  CHAPTER 2

  “Pekan Nuttrees”

  EUROPEANS ENCOUNTER THE PECAN

  When Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World, he initiated the most comprehensive exchange of food and drink the world had ever experienced. Corn, tomatoes, and potatoes went east. Wheat, olives, and livestock went west. Pretty much anything edible and shippable was packed into hogsheads or loaded into pens and sent crisscrossing the Atlantic. So many plants and animals found a comfortable home in foreign soil that the global landscape was fundamentally (and permanently) altered within a century after discovery. The list is virtually endless. European grasses and clovers carpeted the pastures of North America. American grapevines snaked up European trellises. Peruvian potatoes rooted in Irish soil. South American tomatoes brightened Italian gardens. Indian corn filled English feed troughs. French peaches grew in North American orchards. Onions, garlic, parsley, coriander, and oregano altered the New World diet and landscape as much as beans, chile peppers, squash, and agave did the Old World’s. This cross-fertilization truly changed the global diet.1

  Pecans, however, generally stayed out of the Columbian exchange. Although they were by far the most significant native American nut growing in the New World, and although the Spaniards brought barrels of pecan samples back to the Old World, Europeans never embraced pecans with the kind of enthusiasm we might expect. They did not transform and co-opt them the way they did so many other crops indigenous to the New World (say, the potato, the tomato, corn). The decision not to cultivate pecans with any real fervor in the Old World continues to this day. Pecan trees—all cultivated varieties—can be found sparsely in Israel, South Africa, and Australia. Nevertheless, according to The Oxford Companion to Food, they are “still little known outside N. America and Mexico.”2

  This point matters more than it might seem. When we contemplate the history of the pecan tree, we’re contemplating the history of a plant that not only is native to North America but also has the rare distinction of remaining largely confined to the region where it originated. It’s a botanical homebody in an age of floral wanderlust. To this day, virtually all pecans produced for commercial purposes are grown in the southern portion of the United States (mainly Texas, New Mexico, and Georgia). Throughout most of human history, the vast majority of pecans have been consumed at home. Pecans, in essence, are native nuts that have largely remained on native turf. This is unusual.3

  To begin understanding exactly why this is the case, it is necessary to make a brief detour down a related path of natural history, one that leads to another nut that shares many of the pecan’s culinary qualities: the walnut. The walnut tree is in the same family as the pecan—Juglandaceae. Whereas the pecan colonized an expanse of southern North America, however, the European walnut colonized a much wider swath of the global landscape—territories extending all the way from southeastern Europe to Asia. Much like pecans, walnuts have been gathered, stored, cracked, roasted, and eaten whole since thousands of years before the dawn of agriculture. Also like pecans, they’re an ideal forage crop. Unlike pecans, though, the walnut had a much larger native geographical range, several more immediate uses, and exposure to groups of global travelers seemingly interested in planting it everywhere they set foot.

  The Persians pressed walnut oil and sold it throughout the Mediterranean, especially to the ancient Greeks. The French valued walnut wood for furniture making, as did the English after the importation of the walnut across the channel in the fifteenth century. The Chinese used walnuts to make ketchup. Other cultures pickled them an
d ate them as a condiment throughout the year. Romans enjoyed the nuts so much that they tossed them at newlyweds during wedding celebrations. Walnut leaves were commonly employed by many cultures as a swift and thorough laxative.4 Everyone throughout Europe and Asia seemed to appreciate the taste, use, and high productivity of walnuts (they are not alternate bearing). The walnut has consistently been a remarkably popular and versatile nut—and that is precisely why the walnut matters for the pecan. It was so popular and versatile that it would have been redundant to have imported and cultivated a nut so similar to it as the pecan. It would have been a waste of energy. In essence, where the walnut existed, and where the walnut traveled and took root, the pecan had little reason to go.5

  It could thus be said that the walnut played a deterrent role in the pecan’s geographical expansion. This was the case not only in Europe but in North America as well. The European walnut was so enthusiastically cultivated by Europeans that when they came to the New World, settlers felt they could not do without it—its superior wood, sweet meat, and curative leaves were too valuable to forgo in an unfamiliar landscape. The tree was thus eventually planted in those very regions of North America where native pecan groves did not reach. In the east, it joined and eventually overtook the native black walnut in New England. Writing in 1847, the American botanist Andrew Jackson Downing called the European walnut “a fine lofty growing tree, with a handsome spreading head, and bearing large and excellent nuts.” It was a tree that he was sure would be “profitable . . . for the market.” Spanish missionaries planted the European walnut throughout California in the 1800s with equally prolific consequences. Today, 75 percent of the commercial walnut production in the world occurs in the central valley of California.6

  In essence, whenever and wherever Europeans arrived in the New World, they brought with them European walnuts to plant. The European walnut, in turn, helped hem the pecan in in its native habitat. So inconsequential did the pecan seem beyond its indigenous border that when Downing wrote his comprehensive book on American fruit trees in the mid—nineteenth century, the pecan did not even get a mention. As late as 1915, the famous plant breeder Luther Burbank was openly wishing for hardier pecan cultivars “so that the pecan might be cultivated further to the north.” The interest in taking the pecan north, however, never materialized. The fact that no northern cultivars existed by that date is a telling testament to the walnut’s incredible promiscuity and the pecan’s contrasting provincialism. It also helps explain why the pecan stayed in place.7

  The pecan tree’s tendency to stay near home had a lot to do with precisely why the pecan was valued as it was. Pecan wood was little needed as a building material, much less as fuel. Writing in 1908, the civil engineer Charles Henry Snow explained how “the pecan affords wood so inferior as to be little used in construction.” The major problem with pecan wood is that without the use of industrial blowers, it is extremely difficult to dry. Even in the modern era it requires, according to one specialist in wood quality, “7–15 days in the kiln to dry 1-inch lumber from green to 6 percent moisture.” An 1874 newspaper article on wood types called the pecan “a wood not so valuable by any means.” In preindustrial times it would have been far too heavy, as a result of its moisture content, to haul over long distances. Today, pecan wood is dried through intensive industrial methods and is used for furniture making, flooring (mainly for gymnasiums), cabinetry, and architectural trim—all of which would have been largely irrelevant to both the Indians and the Europeans who first encountered the dense groves of pecan trees. This reputation of being less than an ideal building material continues to this day. As the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service currently explains, “Pecan wood is inferior to that of other hickories and is not important commercially.”8

  Awareness of the walnut’s benefits, in addition to the pecan’s inferiority as a building material or a reliable source of fuel, thereby managed to keep it exclusively rooted in its natively circumscribed zone. Even more important than these factors, though, was the fact that the pecan was valued for one characteristic above all others: the quality of its nuts. So when Europeans—namely, the Spanish and the French—finally encountered the pecan, they did so not on their own turf and on their own terms, as they did with so many other plants and animals brought back to Europe. Instead, Europeans witnessed the pecan as travelers and explorers dealing with a radically new landscape, one inhabited by strange new cultures and bearing bizarre, oblong, bronzed new fruit. Fruit that, as we will find, they often saw as, alas, a type of walnut.

  Isolation was an unusual situation for a fruit-bearing tree to be in during the era after Columbus’s discovery. The movement of biomass eastward across the Atlantic became so intense that most Europeans first saw common New World plants in a European garden or marketplace. Once European adventurers exhausted efforts to discover gold and silver deposits in the resource-rich Americas, they turned to botanical exploration. Very often exploration turned to exploitation, and exploitation to biopiracy, as Europeans sought profit from the potential riches sprouting out of the soil rather than continuing to seek the ores beneath it. Just to see the pecan, much less eat it, Europeans were going to have to travel. Indeed, unless one had a friend with eccentric botanical interests or an experimental garden, the pecan would have to be witnessed on the rugged and hotly contested terrain of southern North America.9

  When they initially came across the native nut, Spanish and French travelers more often than not judged it to be a walnut. As Cabeza de Vaca traveled from Galveston to the Guadalupe River in 1533, he recalled approaching “the place of which we had been told to eat walnuts.” De Vaca’s walnuts were pecans. He added that these mysterious dense nuts were “ground with a small kind of grain and this is the subsistence of the people two months in the year without any other thing.” Whatever he thought he was seeing, de Vaca was so impressed with their swollen abundance that he described the Guadalupe as “a river of nuts.” Lope de Oviedo, a member of de Vaca’s exploration party, stressed the importance of these sweet oval nuggets, mentioning how “there were on the banks of the river many nuts, which the Indians ate in their season, coming from twenty or thirty leagues round about.” He too thought he was looking at a walnut, but noted that “these nuts were much smaller than those [walnuts] of Spain.”10 Hernando de Soto, the first European to cross the Mississippi River, offered more of the same assessment. He referred to “much oil of walnuts which is clear and of good taste” when, in actuality, he was almost certainly appreciating the benefits of pecan oil.11 When the French voyager Penicault first saw the pecan while traveling in the Natchez region in 1704, he described it as “similar enough to the walnuts of Europe.” His fellow Frenchman Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz observed that the Mississippi River was lined with trees bearing “a very small kind of walnut . . . more delicate than our own, less oily.” Even as late as the 1770s, the Spanish traveler Antonio de Ulloa described “Pecanos” as, yet again, a “kind of walnut.” It is commonly noted that colonial explorers and adventurers tended to interpret New World phenomena in Old World terms. This was certainly true with the Spanish and French reaction to the foreign pecan.12

  Such cultural expressions were predictable enough. A handful of travelers, though, were quicker to bear witness to the pecan as something altogether new to their experience. The Frenchman André Malraux described the nut in its own terms—or, more to the point, in terms that Indians were using. In 1795 he found a grove of pecans in southern Illinois and called the fruits “Pekan Nuttrees.” By the late seventeenth century most Spanish travelers were mentioning pecan trees as an iconic aspect of the southern landscape. When, in 1693, Gregorio de Salinas Varona traveled from the San Marcos region of central Texas to what is now Palestine, Texas (in order to resupply a team of Spanish missionaries), he recorded in his journal being impressed by “a grove of pecan trees” as he and his party crossed the Nueces River—which, appropriately, was named by Alonso de León for the abundant pecan
s lining it. Several days later Varona awoke and “departed at six o’clock in the morning through a grove of oak and pecan trees.” A few days afterward, riding “in a northeasterly direction through a very sandy plain,” he wove his way through stands of “oaks, live oaks, and pecan trees.” These references to pecan trees might seem to be perfunctory lines in an explorer’s journal. To the contrary, the fact that Europeans were singling them out for mention suggests that they were perceived as nothing less than an outstanding aspect of an already strange and unfamiliar landscape.13

  French voyagers, most of whom made their way through pecan country in the early eighteenth century, not only generally knew the pecan to be a pecan, but they were highly complimentary of the tree’s qualities. P. F. Charlevoix, traveling through “Kaskaquias” (somewhere in southern Illinois) in 1721, confided to his journal how “among the fruits that are peculiar to this country the most remarkable are the pecans.” He described the nut as having “the length and form of a large acorn” and admired its “fine and delicate taste.” Charlevoix’s countryman, the priest Pierre-Gabriel Marest, rated the “nuttree” as having “a better flavor than our nuts in France,” a certain reference to the walnut. In 1758, Le Page du Prazt extolled the pecans as having “a flavor so fine that the French make ‘pralines’ of them as good as those made of almonds.” This New World version of an old French confection would, as we will later see, go on to become a staple of New Orleans’ culinary heritage.14