The Pecan

by James McWilliams

  Another reason that pecans were able to reach consumers was that the 1940s were the decade when the mail-order business began to boom. Pecans were especially well suited to this means of sale and transport. As consumers began to bake more regularly with pecans, they found that it was often hard to find them at local grocery stores. Several companies therefore began to make pecans available by air mail. “The nuts may be shipped without difficulty,” explained one industry analyst, adding that “spiced pecans” were “being introduced now for just that reason.” To obtain them, all one had to do was send a mail-order request to Brownies by Lucille in New York (Lucille and her partner were self-described “professional women who conduct their enterprise after office hours”). Home cooks took ample advantage of such mail-order operations in part because they could order in bulk and store the surplus. The USDA reported that “pecan meats stayed fresh two months at room temperature, nine months at refrigerator temperature, and two years at freezer temperature.” Unlike many other foods, nuts—as Americans dating back to the Native Americans well understood—stored well. Refrigerators, of course, worked better than cold caves (I guess).14

  Mail-order operations, as Brownies by Lucille suggests, were usually homegrown, small-scale endeavors undertaken by women with a personal connection to a pecan source. This was the case for Mrs. Marion Momar, of Cotton Hope Plantation, South Carolina. From the comfort of her home, she “shells and neatly halves pecans, then packs them in a one pound cellophane bag” for mail-order delivery at $1.75, postage included. In that cellophane bag she added “recipes for some of the sweets in which pecans figure prominently—pralines, date pecan pudding, and pecan pie.” This was less of a full-time business than an effort to earn, as she put it, “pin money.” It was also not unusual for restaurants to rely on mail order. The aforementioned Coach House produced pecan pie nine inches in diameter. It could be ordered “through the mail for $3.50 postpaid.” Mail orders played a critical role at a critical time, bridging the gap between producer and consumer before bags of pecans found a permanent place on grocery store shelves, not to mention in the warehouses of cereal makers and ice creameries nationwide. Once these stores did begin to carry bags of pecans—in 1948, for example, when the chain A&P began carrying one-pound bags of unshelled pecans for 49 cents—the mom-and-pop mail-order operations began to diminish. Familiar story. (Although not totally predictable, as the Great San Saba Pecan Company in San Saba, Texas, which is a small, vertically integrated, and successful company, started in the 1970s and thriving today attests.)15

  A related development that helped ensure consumer access to a wider array of pecan-based products was the emergence of frozen foods. The first frozen foods sold at retail were vegetables packaged by Birds Eye Frosted Foods. This was in 1930. The Springfield, Massachusetts, company set a trend that is not only with us today more than ever, but swept up pecan products in the 1940s and 1950s. The most common pecan-based delicacy to emerge from the frozen dessert boom was the pecan pie. The prime mover on this score was Hartford’s Connecticut Pie Company, founded in 1917. In 1949 the company transitioned from fresh to frozen pies, with its most popular item being the “Southern pecan pie.” These frozen disks sold so well that in 1959 the company created a subsidiary called Farm House Frozen Pies. This company distributed frozen pecan pies to grocery stores across the United States, where they sold for under 90 cents each.16

  As the advent of the frozen pecan pie suggests, an important transition was under way: pecans were increasingly being absorbed by commercial food producers rather than by domestic consumers. This was especially true by the late 1950s and early 1960s. For example, Pepperidge Farm put out two extremely popular items: Butter Pecan Rolls and Cinnamon Pecan Wedges—horrible for one’s health, but items that millions of Americans found to be tasty enough to eat regularly. These items came packaged in an aluminum foil tin pan and consumers were advised to heat the items for eight to ten minutes in a 350-degree oven. Not to be outdone, Betty Crocker followed hot on the heels of Pepperidge Farm, offering butter pecan muffin mix in the 1960s. The result was praised by the Washington Post as “rich and nutty.” Another major commercial supplier of pecan products was the restaurant and candy store chain known as Stuckey’s. Started by William Stuckey in 1938 in the small town of Eastman, Georgia, the chain—distinguished by its signature red signs and blue roofs—went on to line highways throughout the country, mostly in the South, where 160 stores consumed massive amounts of pecans, most of them stuffed into pies, and most of them sourced from founder William Stuckey’s native state of Georgia.17

  Commercial developments evolved in tandem with the growing scale of pecan production and distribution. In 1954, the New York–based company Standard Brands, which distributed an array of food products including tea, pudding, yeast, and vodka, purchased the San Antonio–based Southern Pecan Shelling Company. This acquisition, according to the Wall Street Journal, would likely enable pecans to go large scale, reaching not just home bakers but “candy and ice cream manufacturers and other bulk users.” The prediction bore fruit when, seven years later, Standard bought the Curtiss Candy Company, providing direct access to pecans for a variety of popular candies (although the pecan’s unusual oiliness prevented it from becoming a common nut in candy bars). In 1963, the Pet Milk Company, which had built a fortune by selling evaporated milk during wartime but, with the fighting over, had recently transformed into a “food products conglomerate,” constructed a 75,000-square-foot pecan-processing plant and cold storage warehouse in Albany, Georgia. This move not only affirmed Georgia’s status as one of the nation’s largest pecan-producing states by the 1960s, but also signaled the pecan’s transition into an industrial-scale domestic crop. An additional element of the emerging pecan industry infrastructure was the relentless consolidation of the shelling industry. Between 1945 and 1990, the number of shelling companies diminished nationally from 150 to 22. Consolidation continued unabated, emblematic of the American way of production.18

  A final aspect of the unusually absorbent domestic market for pecans was the emergence of a wide variety of secondary uses for pecans and pecan by-products. Pecan nut oil became popular as a lubricant in making clocks and guns. Pecan shells were used to oil jet engines. Catholics used pecans to “lend variety to Lenten meals.” By the late 1960s and 1970s, pecans had become a central part of an increasingly popular vegetarian diet. Noting that “vegetarianism had become a serious, integral part of America’s eating habits,” food writer Louis Szathmary promoted pecans as an important source of protein. Other vegetarians—perhaps inadvertently perpetuating the nuts’ “crunchy” aspect—became granola fanatics, and pecans became a basic ingredient of the healthy cereal. A recipe for “flamboyant granola” called for a cup of pecans, plus five other kinds of nuts. As the pecan industry grew, a market for pecan wood eventually developed. The most notable use was as flooring for basketball courts. The first court to be installed was at Georgetown University (my alma mater). Declaring that there was “more bounce to the ounce on courts made of pecan,” the New York Times reported that a pecan court was “desirable for its resiliency.” The same might be said for the domestic market that arose to consume the vast surplus of pecans that American eaters had confronted at the beginning of the 1940s.19

  The national quest to shove pecans into virtually every food product that had a little extra room for stuffing was nothing new to the increasingly consolidating and industrializing American food industry. Corn and soy, as readers of Michael Pollan well know, get processed and jammed into every food item imaginable. Less well known is that the practice of seeking new and varied uses for pecans paralleled the efforts to seek novel and varied uses for crops such as corn and soy well into the late twentieth century. The story recounted in this chapter continued for decades. Indeed, between 1960 and 2000, several pecan-based trends developed to keep American consumers wedded to their native nut.

  The most notable of these was the creation of more savory entr�
�es that made pecans the central focus, rather than an addendum to be sprinkled on for garnish right before serving. Pecan-stuffed onions required boiling a large onion, hollowing out the center, stuffing it with a mixture of chopped pecans, bread crumbs, and the part of the onion that had been removed, and baking it “till soft and crumbs are brown.” A recipe for “wild rice pecan casserole” instructed the home cook to sauté onions, pecans, garlic, and mushrooms in butter, mix with cooked rice, place in a casserole, and bake. A pecan vegetable loaf that became popular in the 1950s included more than half a cup of pecans per serving. A popular version of pecan potato croquettes was as much pecan as potato. All these recipes were featured in both national newspapers and popular cookbooks, including Woman’s Day Book of Baking, New Southern Cooking, and Main Courses (Company’s Coming).20

  Pecans also began to end up in massively consumed and highly processed items such as ice cream and cereal—two dumping grounds that would prove very popular and profitable for pecan producers and distributors toward the end of the century. Ice cream became a standard destination for pecans with the advent of the industrial-scale “ingredient feeder.” The Hoyer RF-SI00 rotary filler was the key. This device could process pecans into 2,400 gallons of ice cream an hour. As a result, the “mix-in business” moved to something of an elevated plateau, a point it had been working to reach since the 1950s, when the Pecan Deluxe Candy Company of Dallas started to supply ice cream shops with “mix in” chopped pecans. By the 1970s, more than seventy shops were using the Pecan Deluxe product. The mechanized ingredient feeder changed the nature of the game. Pecans were no longer mixed in by hand by a high school kid at the corner ice cream shop. Instead they were churned in by an industrial producer such as ConAgra Foods and the ice cream was produced on a gargantuan scale for retail distribution. By the end of the 1990s, every ice cream producer, from generic brands to Godiva, offered one variety or another of pecan ice cream. Butter pecan remains a great favorite among ice cream devotees today.21

  Pecans went beyond granola in the 1980s and 1990s and found a niche with cereal companies as well. The appeal of pecans to cereal makers was that in an era of obsessive-compulsive nutritional label reading, even a small amount of pecans added a range of beneficial vitamins and minerals that could be championed. The drawback was that in an age of even more obsessive-compulsive calorie counting, the nuts added a big serving of fat (albeit mostly unsaturated). “The best cereals,” explained Consumer Reports, “give you a good dose of fiber and a little fat.” Aiming to strike this balance, companies like Kellogg, General Mills, Quaker Oats, and Post discovered how “indulgent ingredients like pecans” created a “value added cereal” that was extremely popular with consumers. “Taste,” explained Brandweek, “is especially important to attract and keep” the cereal-eating audience during a period of exploding cereal options, lest (God forbid) the “magic of the cereal aisle begin to wear off.”22

  Another development that sustained pecan consumption well into the late twentieth century was the evolution of the pecan pie from a southern delicacy into an über-Americanized dessert available in grocery freezers nationwide. “It would be difficult,” explained Restaurant Hospitality in 1998, “to find a more American dessert than pecan pie.” This upgrade from “southern” to “American” was excellent news for the producers of pecan pie. The article went on to explain, as we have seen, that “it was corn syrup—specifically the Karo brand corn syrup—that boosted the pecan to national prominence.” The dessert might have kept “a decidedly Southern twang,” but there was no denying that, as Nation’s Restaurant News put it, “Nothing sweetens up a menu the way the all-American pecan pie can.” Pecan pies were being frozen and sold by mail order. They were being peddled at large grocery store chains. They could be found at gas station convenience stores in Massachusetts. But this loss of regional identity did not keep Elsie Millicent, the great-granddaughter of pecan pioneer E. E. Risien, from baking and delivering a pecan pie to every new resident of San Saba, Texas. They could have put the pie on the American flag and it would have seemed normal to most Americans.23

  As gourmet cooking—specifically, nouvelle cuisine—began to court the attention of upper-class Americans who wanted to experience French food, the once-aristocratic pecan returned to play an important role. By the late 1980s, highend chefs began to include pecans in a variety of gourmet-cum-comfort-food dishes. Diners at Stephan Pyles’s Star Canyon restaurant in Dallas could find a wild mushroom enchilada with maple-pecan yams. At Bette’s Oceanview Diner in Berkeley, California, patrons could order the ideal comfort food—a stack of buttermilk pancakes—but with pecans added to the batter. These kinds of dishes caught on nationally. But by far the most popular pecan-inspired variation was pecan-encrusted fish. This culinary trend was also actively promoted by the government. “Did you know,” asked the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries, “that a new romance has developed between ever-popular fish and shellfish, and the North American native, the pecan?”

  In Calistoga, California, the noted Louisiana chef Jan Birnbaum—trained by Paul Prudhomme—opened the Catahoula Restaurant and Saloon, where he introduced Californians to pecan-encrusted catfish. Other chefs branched out as well. Alaskan salmon with “pecan crunch coating” started to make its way onto menus in the 1990s, as did “crab and pecan fritters.” Mountain trout with a pecan crust became a defining dish to come out of North Georgia. Chefs in places such as Charleston and Savannah began to promote pecan-encrusted catfish as an emblem of traditional southern fare. It was not until the 1990s, however, that this “tradition” became popular.24

  The end of the twentieth century also witnessed the arrival of a number of miscellaneous pecan-based items. Whether it was pecan-flavored coffee, pecan porter beer, Pecan Sandies and Supremes (both Nabisco innovations), pecan shortbread (Keebler), pecan Danishes, or Texas Chewie Pecan Pralines (ironically, not sold in Texas), the fact remained: American producers were packing pecans into every visible nook and cranny of the American food system. Even pecan shells found wider markets as mulch, barbecue chips, plywood filler, an absorbent for heavy metals, an inert ingredient in pesticides, oil filters, and ink. The annual surpluses of pecans that had begun to glut the market in the 1940s were steadily consumed in the decades that followed. The vast majority of those pecans, moreover, were eaten by American consumers, whose food traditions were flexible enough to incorporate pecans into virtually any dish imaginable, be it sweet, savory, or sour, fresh or frozen, hot or cold. Production and consumption had come into sync. It would not be long, though, before that delicate balance, and the fate of the pecan, shifted yet again. The pecan, ironically, was about to become more popular on the other side of the world than it had ever been at home.

  CHAPTER 8

  “China Wants Our Nuts”

  THE PECAN GOES GLOBAL

  In the spring of 2011 I visited Berdoll Pecan Farms, located on a gentle bend in the Colorado River in Bastrop, Texas. By contemporary standards the farm is not especially large. The Berdoll family, who purchased the property in 1980, cultivates about 15,000 improved trees, mostly Wichita, Navaho, and Pawnee varieties. As Lisa Berdoll showed me around in her expansive Suburban, I was struck by two things in particular. First, the entire operation is a streamlined model of mechanization. Vehicles designed to fit snugly between seemingly endless rows of perfectly aligned pecan trees spray pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides; they lay mulch, prune trees, apply fertilizer, and harvest nuts. Other machines disk the soil and smooth the turf between trees so that fallen nuts do not elude harvest. At times helicopters are even brought in for the purpose of keeping frost from icing the nuts. Propane cannons are on hand to scare off crows. It occurred to me as we drove from orchard to orchard that there was nothing “natural” about a contemporary pecan orchard. I was looking at a factory in the field.

  The second thing that struck me was how the farm makes its money. Berdoll’s profits do not come from selling nuts—most of which go two miles down the
road to the Berdoll retail outlet located on Highway 71 (and virtually impossible to miss, thanks to its gargantuan red neon sign). Instead, the Berdolls make most of their money from their nursery, which contains about 90,000 trees. They cultivate several varieties of pecans that do well in arid climates and sell the saplings to new orchards being developed in West Texas and New Mexico—the new regional crucible of pecan production in the United States. From the American West the pecans go to China. Indeed, the pecan is now a crop with a global market. How that transition happened, and the impact it has had on pecan production and consumption, brings the story of pecan domestication up to the present moment.

  Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, pecan production and consumption in the United States increased by periodic leaps and bounds, all the while keeping close pace with each other. Although the climb was anything but steady, growers increased production from 240 million pounds a year in 1971 to almost 380 million pounds in 1993—a nearly 60 percent gain in output. Pecan acreage in production between 1974 and 1992 increased as well, from 323,000 acres to 462,000 acres—a 42 percent change. Globally, with higher yields per acre, the United States was producing more than 80 percent of the world’s pecans, with most of the other 20 percent coming from northern Mexico near the U.S. border. This general market profile was pretty much what any agricultural industry could ask for: supply and demand were well synced, there were no other significant global producers of pecans with which to compete, and crops were mainly free of persistent external threats such as fungi and insects as a result of generally effective chemical agents and strategies of integrated pest management.1