Pi Day

That is, 3.14.

Over at the Boskone blog, they’re posting pie recipes.  Which inspires me to post one here:

Pecan Pie

• 1 cup white Karo syrup
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 3 eggs, well beaten
• 1 and 1/2 cups chopped pecans
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 2 T butter, melted
• 1 uncooked 9″ pie shell

Mix syrup and sugar well.
Add eggs, butter, vanilla, and pecans.
Mix well; pour into pie shell.
Bake at 350 for 45-50 minutes or until firm.

I haven’t made this recipe for about a decade now, because the canonical version of it, in my mind, requires the pecans that grew on the three pecan trees in the yard of my family’s house in Texas.  My father would spend the autumn picking up the pecans from those trees (two Georgia papershells and one native pecan — the latter were smaller and harder to dig out of their shells, but sweeter), get the shells cracked at a pecan-packing plant across the Red River in Oklahoma, then spend the winter picking the nuts out of their shells while he watched television.  Some years, those three pecan trees would yield 70 pounds or more of pecans; every spring, most of the ones that hadn’t gotten used up over the course of the previous year would get baked into apple-nut cakes and sold at the parish bazaar.  And a lot of them found their way to me, wherever I happened to be living at the time — instead of crumpled newspaper or styrofoam packing peanuts in boxes of stuff from home, I’d get ziploc freezer bags full of fresh pecans.

I was, of course, spoiled forever for store-bought pecans.  They always tasted dry and rancid by comparison.  After my father died, nobody picked up the pecans from the yard anymore, and the house in Texas belongs to someone else now anyway . . . but I still don’t have the heart to make this recipe with any other pecans.

There’s not much connection to writing in all of this, except maybe for the principle that almost everything has a story attached to it if you look hard enough.