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Salted Pecans
Prepare the pecans by breaking the shells carefully, so as to have the nut in two pieces only; parch in a pan as you would coffee, stirring briskly until of a light brown color. Moisten with a little butter; after removing from the oven sprinkle with little salt. Place on small individual dishes before each guest. -Mrs. P. F Pescud.
A two-ingredient recipe that lives or dies on how closely you watch the nuts. The text slides between stovetop and oven language — "parch in a pan as you would coffee" but then "after removing from the oven" — so treat it as a shallow pan in the oven, stirred often.
- Oven temperaturePecans scorch easily because of their high oil content. Around 325F gives even colour; much hotter and the surface can brown before the interior toasts, and browned nuts turn bitter quickly.
- TimingTen to fifteen minutes at 325F in a single layer, stirred every four or five minutes. Pull them when they smell nutty and look a shade lighter than you want — they keep cooking on the hot pan.
- QuantitiesNone are given. For a pound of pecan halves, roughly 2 tablespoons of butter and 1 to 1.5 teaspoons of fine salt is a reasonable starting proportion; start with less salt and add after tasting a cooled nut.
- Shelling"The nut in two pieces only" means whole halves. Bagged pecan halves do the same job and this is the one place in the recipe where a modern shortcut costs nothing.
- Butter and salt orderThe butter goes on while the nuts are hot so it melts and coats; the salt follows immediately so it sticks. Salt added to cool, dry nuts falls straight to the bottom of the dish.
- CoolingSpread them on paper or a cold tray in one layer. Piled hot in a bowl they steam and go soft, and the crispness is the whole appeal.
- Serving and keepingA pound serves a dozen or more as the little individual dishes the recipe describes. Sealed airtight they hold about a week at room temperature; the butter makes them go rancid faster than plain nuts, so refrigerate or freeze for longer.
Salted nuts belong to the formal American dinner table of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, set out in small individual dishes — sometimes silver or cut glass "nut cups" — beside each place, to be picked at between courses or with the last of the wine. It appears here under Fancy Dishes rather than among the confectionery. Pecans are native to the Mississippi valley and Texas, and commercial orchards were expanding in the South over the period in which these community cookbooks were compiled, which is why pecans, rather than almonds, turn up in so many Southern-leaning collections. The instruction to "parch in a pan as you would coffee" assumes a reader who had roasted green coffee beans at home, a common enough chore in the nineteenth century. The attribution to Mrs. P. F. Pescud is typical of the subscription cookbook, where recipes carried the name of the contributing household.