Jim Bradshaw: Of pecans, pralines and bruised thumbs

It’s a sure harbinger of the season when sandwich-board “We Buy Pecans” signs begin to appear in front of feed ’n’ seed and little grocery stores across south Louisiana. They remind me of days spent crawling through the yard when I was a kid, and also makes me begin to hanker for pralines.
One of the small bits of Gov. John Bel Edwards’ legacy will be that he signed the bill making the pecan Louisiana’s official state nut in 2023. Everybody loves them and the trees are native to Louisiana, so I’m surprised that they hadn’t been named years before that — even  though picky people insist that a pecan is technically not a nut, but a fruit.
Whatever they are, we usually harvest about 20 million pounds of pecans each fall in Louisiana, In 2023 the crop was worth $9.7 million, according to the LSU AgCenter. That’s not one of the biggest crops in the state’s agricultural economy, but when I was a kid pecans were a big part of mine. Our trees were 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 in my youth it dropped pecans over almost a third of a big backyard. Several smaller trees also contributed to the harvest.
I’ll bet I crawled 20 miles 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’s General Mercantile, which would be almost full 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 do remember that he’d lost an arm in World War II and that I was absolutely amazed how he could sack, 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 good-sized cardboard 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 $15 to $20 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 family.
Another piece of my nostalgia has to do with shelling the pecans for my granddad’s pralines, and my grandma’s pecan pies. I don’t have his recipes, but grandad’s pralines involved a lot of Steen’s cane syrup and a good bit of butter. Mammaw used a healthy dollop of vanilla and didn’t skimp on the pecans in her pies. (You know how big a dollop is. It depends on how big the pot is, what’s cooking in it, and the whim of the cook. A dollop of hot sauce in a pot of red beans, for example, is smaller than a dollop of vanilla in pecan pie filling. But I digress, as I often do.)
My chore was to crack the pecans with a cast iron cracker mounted on a little wood block. 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 fixed part and cracked the pecan shell. It was something of a challenge to get just the right tension on 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. I usually sported a bruise-blackened thumbnail from the first of October through Thanksgiving.
My grandmother’s general rule was that it takes about 3 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 2½ pounds in the shell, but Mammaw had seen me work. She knew that 3 pounds of crackin’ involved at least a half-pound of eatin’.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.