Jim Bradshaw
It’s a sure sign of the season when sandwich-board “We Buy Pecans” signs begin to appear in front of feed ’n’ seed and little grocery stores across Acadiana, but some county agents are a little worried that there may be fewer nuts to buy this year.
They say the wet weather we’ve been seeing is better for stinkbugs and scab fungus than for pecan trees, and that can mean fewer pecans and pecans with empty shells. We usually harvest about 20 million pounds of pecans each fall in Louisiana but the same sort of wet conditions cut that crop in half last year.
I don’t have a pecan tree anymore, but pecan season is still a catalyst for two bits of nostalgia for me, and I do keep an eye on my neighbor’s tree to see if I can pick up enough for fruitcake at Thanksgiving and a pecan pie at Christmas. When I was a kid, though, our trees were also my ticket to Christmas cash.
The biggest pecan tree in our yard was huge and ancient. If it had been an oak it would have qualified for the Live Oak Society. Hurricane Rita finally banged it up so badly that it had to be cut down, but when I was a kid it shaded, and dropped pecans, over a third of the backyard. Several smaller trees also contributed to the harvest.
I’ll bet I crawled a hundred miles after school each fall, picking up pecans by the grocery sack full. These were emptied into the biggest cardboard box that we could scrounge from behind Swice General Mercantile — one that a washing machine came in was really great.
I’d almost fill the box by the time the pecan buyer came by in early November.
I can’t remember his name, it might have been Mr. Johnson, but I remember he’d lost an arm in World War II and I was absolutely amazed how he could heft and weigh the pecans with just one arm. He had a hanging scale that swung from the back of his Jeep Woody station wagon to weigh my harvest.
I think the going rate was a less than a quarter a pound in those days, but you’d be surprised how many pounds a washing machine box will hold. I’ve heard that a mature pecan tree can produce a hundred pounds of nuts each year, and that seems to be about right. I’d get $20 to $25 for what I picked up each year — a lot of money for a kid, or anyone, in the 1950s.
The first thing I would do after he’d peeled my pay off the roll he carried in the pocket of his khaki shirt was to hit the neighborhood drug store for a major comic book haul. But then it was straight to Kress’s Five & Dime to pick out Christmas presents for the whole family.
The other bit of nostalgia has to do with shelling the pecans for my grandma’s fruitcakes and my granddad’s pralines. We used a cast iron cracker that screwed to the table. One end of it was a fixed, circular piece of metal, indented so that the point of a pecan would fit into it. The other end had a similar head, but slid up and down on a bar when you pulled a lever.
The movable part pushed the pecan into the immovable part and cracked the pecan shell. Then the meat had to be picked from the cracked shell. It was something of a challenge to get just the right tension in the cracker so that the shell broke but the meat could be extracted whole. The other challenge was to get through a whole pecan season without crushing your thumb in the cracker. Bruise-blackened thumbnails were a common sight at our house by late October.
My grandmother’s general rule was that it takes about three pounds of pecans in the shell to turn out one pound (about four cups) of shelled nuts.
The folks at the home extension office say it really takes only about two and a half pounds in the shell, but Mammaw had seen me work. She knew that three pounds of crackin’ involved at least a half pound of eatin’.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, Cajuns and Other Characters, is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.