Home › Cake Fillings And Frostings › Salted Pecans (Shelled pecans may be bought)
Salted Pecans (Shelled pecans may be bought)
Shelled pecans may be bought by the pound, which is much the best way when used for salting, as it is difficult to remove the nut meat without breaking. Fry same as salted Almonds I or II. Care must be taken that they do not remain in fat too long; having a dark skin, color does not determine when they are sufficiently cooked. 1 lb. figs 1 lb. dates
A cross-reference recipe: the method lives under Salted Almonds, and this entry exists only to warn you that pecans cheat the usual visual cue. The stray "1 lb. figs 1 lb. dates" at the end is type bleeding in from the neighbouring confection and has nothing to do with the nuts.
- The hinge: you cannot judge by colourPecans are already brown, so the golden-tan signal that tells you almonds are done never arrives. The book gives no time or temperature, so go by smell and pull them as soon as they turn fragrant; they carry on cooking a little on the drain rack.
- Salted Almonds I and II, in briefSalted Almonds I and II are the cross-referenced recipes and are not reprinted here: one method fries the nuts in fat, the other bakes them with butter, stirring often. The exact fats and wording of each would need to be checked against those entries.
- Fat choiceUse a neutral oil with a high smoke point: peanut, canola or refined sunflower. Much of the olive oil sold in America in the 1890s was mild and comparatively low-flavoured rather than like a modern extra-virgin, which can taste bitter at frying heat.
- Fry in small batchesA cup at a time in a small deep pan. Crowding drops the fat temperature and the nuts absorb oil instead of crisping, which is the usual cause of a greasy, limp result.
- Salt while hotSalt clings only to the film of fat on a hot nut. Fine salt or a table salt is better than flakes here, since coarse crystals slide off pecan grooves once the nuts cool.
- Drain"Brown paper" means unglazed wrapping paper; a paper towel or a wire rack over a sheet pan does the same job. A rack keeps the underside from steaming soft.
- Buying pecansThe advice still holds — shelled halves are worth the money, and pecan meat breaks easily coming out of the shell. Buy them fresh, taste one first, and keep them in the freezer; pecans are high in unsaturated fat and go rancid faster than almonds.
- YieldOne pound of pecan halves makes about 4 cups, enough for a large party bowl. They keep a week in an airtight tin, and recrisp in a 300F oven for a few minutes.
Salted nuts belonged to the formal dinner table rather than the snack bowl: in the 1890s they were set out in small dishes at each place or passed with the dessert course and the bonbons, which is how they came to sit in this chapter alongside stuffed figs and dates. Pecans (Carya illinoinensis) are usually described as the most commercially important nut native to North America, and their spread into Northern cookbooks followed the growth of grafted orchards in Texas, Louisiana and Georgia in the later nineteenth century — earlier books tend to assume almonds. The note that shelled pecans "may be bought by the pound" shows they could be had ready-shelled from the grocer, and that Farmer thought it worth telling readers not to bother cracking their own.