4 recipes that use pecan halves, with photos, step-by-step instructions and cook times. The quickest, New Orleans pralines, takes 30 minutes. It is most often cooked with vanilla extract, butter and sugar.
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Hummingbird cake arrived in the South from Jamaica in the late 1960s and became famous after a Greensboro, North Carolina reader sent the recipe to a Southern magazine; it has been a church bake-sale and birthday favourite ever since. Mashed banana, crushed pineapple and toasted pecans make a moist, spiced oil cake under cream cheese frosting. Chef's tip: use very ripe, black-spotted bananas for sweetness and moisture.
Ica's sweet shops, along the road into town and around the main square, stack tejas in long rows, each one wrapped in white tissue paper with frilled ends. Inside the thin, crackly sugar shell is a soft centre of manjar blanco with a pecan or a piece of candied fruit; Ica has been making them since the 19th century and they are the city's best-known souvenir. They are intensely sweet, so one or two with coffee is enough. The hard part is the fondant: stir it while it's too hot and it turns grainy and opaque too early, so let the syrup cool before working it. This version makes a quick manjar blanco from condensed and evaporated milk and uses pecans; candied lime or orange peel works the same way. Chef's tip: chill the filled centres until firm before dipping; warm ones melt into the fondant and lose their shape.
Pecans grow wild along the rivers of Georgia, Alabama and Texas, and pecan pie, a gooey brown-sugar custard packed with toasted nuts, is the star of Thanksgiving tables right across the South. This version uses golden syrup and dark brown sugar for a caramel flavour. Chef's tip: toast the pecans first; raw pecans taste flat and go soft in the filling.
In New Orleans a praline (say 'praw-leen') is a flat, fudgy disc of pecans set in brown sugar and cream, sold in waxed paper from candy shops along Decatur Street and by street vendors since the 1800s. It melts on the tongue rather than snapping like brittle. Chef's tip: use a sugar thermometer and take the pan off at 114 °C; a few degrees more and they turn grainy and hard.
American
Peruvian
