Pecan Flavour Inspiration

The pecan is the only major tree nut native to North America, and people have been eating it there for around 8,000 years—hence the popularity of pecan pie in the US. Its name comes from an indigenous, Algonquin word, ‘paka-n’, via the French, ‘pacane’, which described nuts with shells hard enough to need a stone to crack them. 

For most of that history the pecan grew wild, because a tree grown from seed is unpredictable: plant a nut from a good tree and you have no idea what you will get. That changed in 1846, when an enslaved gardener known to us only as Antoine grafted a superior pecan onto wild rootstock at Oak Alley Plantation in Louisiana. Grafting let a grower copy one good tree hundreds of times over, and the entire commercial pecan industry grew out of that single piece of skilled work. 

The United States and Mexico still grow most of the world’s pecans, and the nut has strong associations with autumn and Christmas baking, which makes the ‘ber months exactly the right moment to feature it in your range.