With Thanksgiving on the horizon my mind turns to pecan pie.
Pecan. Pee-can? Peh-can? Pecken?!
Nobody says pecken.
No matter how you pronounceit I love the stuff.
But before we had this modern gooey, corn sirupey concoction whatdid it taste like?
Well today I'm going to find out by making a syrup-less, hundred yearold recipe for Texas pecan pie.
So thank you to Bright Cellars for sponsoring this video as we make the original pecan pie,
this time on Tasting History.
So the first mention of pecan pie that I could find came from Harper's Bazar in 1886.
"Pecan pie is not only delicious, but is capboel of being made a real state pie,
as an enthusiastic admirer said."
Not entirely sure what a state pie is unless they man like a 'state pie'
cus pecan pie is the state pie of Texas but that didn't happen until 2013,
so I'm not sure but
after this description they do go on to give a vague recipe of
how to make pecan pie, pretty much useless though.
The first useful recipes though start cropping up just a few years after this, and there are a lot of them.
And they're pretty much all the same but this one from 1914 is in my opinion the best written one.
"Texas Pecan Pie. Cook together one cup of sweet milk, one cupful of sugar, three well beaten eggs,
one tablespoon of flour, and one half cupful of finely chopped pecan meats.
Line a pie tin with rich crust, fill with the mixture and bake until done.
Whip the whites of two eggs with two tablespoonfuls of sugar until stiff,
spread over the top of the the pie and brown slightly in the oven,
sprinkling a few chopped nuts over the top."
Wonderfully simple, almost as easy as ordering wine from today's sponsor Bright Cellars.
Now it was once said by a great person "One should not buy wine on label alone."
Pretty sure nobody actually said that but that doesn't mean it's not true.
And when you go to the store that's really usually all you have to go on.
Which is why I love Bright Cellars.
After a year of using them, they have my taste preferences down.
But even from the start I took their simple 7 question quiz and they paired me wines they thought I'd like.
And they were pretty spot on.
Every month I get a box sent directly to my door filled with familiar favorites like
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It's a Bordeaux blend from the southwest of France.
Oh it' so smooth.
Super juice. Like dark juicy.
Black berry, dark plums.
This would go really, really well with-
go really, really well with like a steak.
I don't have a steak, I have pecan pie but
it's gonna go really, really well with that too.
And for the month of November to support Tasting History, Bright Cellars is giving viewers 70% off their 1st order
plus a bonus cork screw.
Just follow the link in the description to take the quiz so you can start discovering wines that you will love.
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So for this recipe what you'll need is:
1 cup or 235ml of whole milk,
1 cup or 220 grams of brown sugar,
3 eggs, 1 tablespoon of flour,
a 1/2 cup or 65 grams of finely chopped pecans,
a pinch of salt,
plus some additional chopped nuts for the top, or
as some other contemporary recipes call for
a layer of nuts on top of the filling, which is what I'm actually gonna do because
it's just more nutty.
Also you'll need a tin lined with your favorite pie crust.
Now I found that the quantity of filling that this recipe makes is really not enough
for like a modern deep pie dish.
So I'm using a tart dish,
which is much shallower and it worked really, really well but if you want to make
more of a traditional pie then I would double everything.
Either way you should blind bake the crust by lining the crust with foil and then adding baking beans,
and putting it in the oven at 425 degrees Fahrenheit or 220 Celcius for about 12 minutes.
Then remove the foil and the beans, and return it to the oven for 5-7 minutes
or until the bottoms starts to brown.
Then take it out of the oven and let it cool, and turn the oven down to 350 degrees Fahrenheit or 175 Celcius,
while you go ahead and make your filling.
For that first thing to do is whisk your eggs,
then in a medium sauce pan add the milk, sugar, eggs,
flour, pecans, and the salt,
and whisk everything to combine.
Then set it over low heat and gently stir while it warms and begins to thicken.
And you want to make sure that it is over low heat. You want it to happen fairly slowly because it's the eggs
that are thickening into a custard.
If it happens too fast then they just scramble and that's going to make for a really gross filling.
But after about 7 or 8 minutes, or until its thickened just a bit, go ahead and pour it into the pie shell.
Now here's where several recipes call for you to add an extra layer of pecans on top,
so that is what I am going to do because I think it's pretty.
Then take the pie and pop it into the oven for 30-35 minutes or until there's just a slight wobble in the center.
While it bakes I would love it if you would hit that Like button as I teach you about the history
of pecans and their associated pies.
The word pecan comes via the French from the Algonquin word 'paccan'
meaning any nut that needed a stone to crack it.
The nut which is native to North America originally growing along the Mississippi from Illinois down to New Orleans,
and over to Oklahoma and Texas was used by Native tribes in the region up to 8000 years ago.
They were a staple of the diet, partly because they are a great food for foraging.
Even months after they fall from the tree they are still good to eat.
Also the oils could be used to thicken soups and broths
and the pecan could actually be used to make
a fermented drink that was semi-alcoholic and intoxicating and ain't nothing wrong with that.
Now the first Europeans to encounter pecans were the Spanish
In 1541 Hernando de Soto described
"A new kind of walnut with a softer shell and formed like bullets,
which the Indians kept in huge stores in their houses."
And these were undoubtedly pecans.
Now for my money I'm really glad that the Spanish name did not stick.
They called them nuez de la arruga which translates roughly to wrinkled nut.
And a wrinkled nut pie just
doesn't sound as appealing as pecan.
Now for most of it's history the pecan was a wild tree, the first orchard not even being planted until 1772 in Long Island NY.
And it was around this time that the nut became very popular with the English colonists.
Thomas Jefferson really enjoyed the nut but at the time he called them Illinois nuts,
and he gave some in 1775 to George Washington who then had them planned on Mount Vernon.
And a French who served with Washington in the Revolution remarked
The celebrated General always had his pockets full of these nuts and he was constantly eating them."
And after Jefferson was sent to France as an ambassador he implored a friend in Philadelphia
"...procure me two or three hundred Pecan nuts from the Western country.
They should come as fresh as possible, and come best I believe in a box of sand."
Interesting.
Now the problem with the wild pecan nuts, or the planted pecans, were
that their flavor was unpredictable. They could be sweet or very, very bitter
even coming from the same tree.
The way to improve the consistency was to graft them to an existing tree.
And there were times when it was done in the early 1800s successfully
though not in a very large scale.
It wasn't until 1846 that an enslaved gardener at Oak Alley Plantation named Antoine
successfully grafted 16 trees and later another 100 trees.
And it's the nuts from those trees that 30 years later
at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition won Best Pecan for their
"Remarkably large size, tenderness of shell, and very especial excellence."
So side note I tried to actually learn more about Antoine and
it turns out there isn't a lot of information that I could find
on him which is not surprising.
But it turns out that the end of November, in just a few weeks,
Katy Morlas Shannon is publishing his biography, so who knows I might be back sometime in the future with
an addendum on the life of Antoine.
But for now just know that his trees were very, very important.
They became known as Centennial pecan trees
and they were the basis for the commercial pecan industry
for quite some time.
It was also shortly after this that a lot of the recipes for pecan pie start cropping up.
Now some say that the pecan pie was invented by French colonists in New Orleans,
and there is some evidence going back to 1758 for pecan pralines or
in New Orleans but pie
not so much.
Pretty much all of the early pecan pie recipes came from Texas and it's no wonder because
Texans loved their pecans.
"Tyler is a Texas town with about 12,000 people who eat a carload of pecans every year.
If New York ate pecans at the same rate, it would consume our whole crop."
But unfortunately for Tyler, Texas the word about pecan nuts had gotten out.
One of the early proponents of the nut was the head of the Battle Creek Sanatorium in Michigan.
He actually said that being high in iron and lime, pecan could completely replace milk in a person's diet,
which is a little ironic since the man was John Harvey Kellogg
inventor of Kellogg's Cornflakes.
Which you eat with milk, not pecans and that's probably why his brother was in charge of the business.
Now I'm going to have to do an entire about John Harvey Kellogg because he was a fascinating and
odious man. He was pretty horrible even for his time.
And he basically invented breakfast cereal an an anti-aphrodisiac.
So, yeah. Definitely deserves a full episode.
But back to pecans. Now that the flavor was fairly consistent
the only problem in the pecan industry
was that they were extremely labor intensive because they still had to be shelled
by hand, and pecan sheller was one of the most dangerous
and low paying jobs in America.
Dangerous because the pecan dust would get into people's lungs and cause them major health problems.
And low paying as in $1 to maybe $4 dollars a week
which even a century ago weren't that much.
And it was these factors that led to the Pecan Sheller's Strike.
On January 1st 1938 in San Antonio, Texas
12,000 pecan shellers, mostly Hispanic women, walked off the job.
Now after almost 2 months the strike ended mostly in favor of the shellers.
Unfortunately at around the same time a pecan shelling machine
came on the market, and within just a couple of years the job of pecan sheller was no more.
But it was a time when pecans became their most popular due to two factors.
First was WWII when pecans became a replacement for meat when meat was scarce.
And the second factor was the popularization of pecan pie.
Like I said in Texas and some other Southern states
pecan pie had been around for quite some time,
and mostly in the form that we are making today on the show.
But in the 1930's Karo syrup started slapping recipes for pecan pies using their syrup on every bottle of their corn syrup.
Now the company claimed that it was the wife of the sales exec who invented the pie
when looking for new ways to use their Karo corn syrup.
And that is patently false but
they were responsible for making it as popular as it has become.
But popular or not in 1942
the pie came with a warning.
"True Southern pecan pie is one of the richest, most deadly desserts of my knowledge.
It is more overpowering than English treacle pie, which it resembles in texture,
for to insult of the cooked-down syrup is added the injury of the rich pecan meats.
It is a favorite with folk who have a sweet tooth, and fat men in particular are addicted to it."
Well I wouldn't say that I'm addicted to it but I am looking forward to tasting it.
So once your pie is baked, take it out of the oven and let it cool and once it's cool
you can go ahead and make your merengue.
What you'll need is: 2 egg whites and 2-3 tablespoons of fine sugar.
Since you're probably using large egg whites, I would go with 3 tablespoons of sugar.
Now the most important thing when making a good merengue is that everything, the bowl, the whisk or beaters or whatever you're using
is completely dry. So make sure that everything is dry,
and once it is whisk the egg whites on a medium speed until you start to get soft peaks.
Then switch it into high gear and very slowly add in the sugar.
Then keep whisking until you get nice, shiny, stiff peaks.
Then you can either spread it on the pie or you can pipe it on .
This is the time to use your creativity.
You can either put it on the entire pie or just on parts of it, the outside, the inside.
Whatever you want, make it look pretty.
Then return the pie to the oven for about 12 minutes to let the merengue brown,
and it's ready to serve.
And here we are, syrup-less Texas pecan pie from 1914.
Let's give it a go.
That is great.
I gotta say Iike it more than regular pecan pie.
It's not as sickly sweet.
Not that I mind sickly sweet, but it's not as sickly sweet but it's also not as gelatinous, gooey.
It's more of like a smoothness, because it's a custard really.
And you get a little bit of the crunch from the nuts inside but then you get a lot of crunch from the nuts that I put on top.
I would go ahead and do that, even whether they are chopped nuts or whatever, just cus they get toasted a little bit
when they're on top. And that really helps with the texture.
It's also more of a pecan pie, that's the flavor that I'm getting. It's the pecans
rather than just the syrup, or the sugar in this case.
And that's what Iwant.
PECAN PIE.
So if you make this pie make sure you share a picture with me on Instagram or
on the Tasting History sub-Reddit or Discord.
I'll put links to those in the description.
Last year for Thanksgiving a lot of people made the Pumpion Pie and shared pictures,
and I just love that.
And if you haven't seen the Pumpion Pie episode I will put that right here, just click
and you can watch it right now.
I'll see you next time on Tasting History.