I Say Pe KAHHHHNS . . .

Pecans feature prominently on our soul food menu, perhaps gaudily so. They are standard in our Etzlenu house salad and also garnish our spinach salad, seasoned with cayenne and sugar and butter. They get popped into our stuffed majool dates every once in a while when I’m feeling large (walnuts are the more typical offering). They go into a riff of breads/cakes like banana bread and carrot cake. They seem to get tossed into anything having carrots, hell if I know why. They are a great garnish for numerous soups. And of course, the king of them all: the pecan pie.

Pecans are such a staple of my life. My maternal grandparents in Americus, Georgia had pecan trees growing “out back,” there for the picking, which we did by the bushel. My mom, for some reason, would always make a side trip to pecan orchards when we were visiting in Americus, just to load up on more pecans. Our refrigerator at home growing up was stuffed with pecans, enough to make a flotilla of Claxton fruticakes, if you ever wanted to do so, which I didn’t, because I thought they were vile, which I still do, to this day.

The fact of the matter is that no matter how far I run from my childhood and my growing-up history in a bigoted South, pecans remain a perfect thing. The very first pies I ever baked were pecan pies. The very last thing I’m likely to bake in my life will be a pecan pie. I have the capacity to imagine countess sordid deeds involving pecan pies.

Just don’t put the accent on the first syllable. Please.