  Mention Pecan to any one who has tasted the improved paper shell variety and they will assume that you are talking of Paper Shell Pecans. For the person who cracks and eats paper shell pecans feels it almost a sacrilege to call the common wild pecan a pecan. Yet there are thousands of Americans who have never tasted paper shell pecans, and who think of pecans only as wild pecans, grown largely in Texas. Pecans are divided in three general but radically different classes, as the description and cuts below indicate. Wild Pecan—a staple food among Indians The ordinary wild pecan is native to America. The earliest French explorers found that one of the staple foods of the Indians was this palatable nut which grew in the forests of the south, and in that portion of Mexico adjoining the Gulf States. Pecan trees in Texas and Louisiana have been found which were over five hundred to seven hundred years old—which were still yielding large crops of nuts. Like the oak, no one ever knew a Pecan tree to die of old age. There are in the Southern States wild pecan trees of which the records go back to the first civilization on this continent. The pecan tree is so symmetrical and beautiful that it is called “The Queen Shade Tree of Many a Southern Home.” Its fruitage is so prolific that it is said to be “one of the most astonishing food engines in all nature, yielding literally barrels of nuts.” “Your Pecan Is Superior To Our Walnut,” Says BurbankIn the American Nut Journal, May, 1915, we read: “Luther Burbank is credited with the following statement regarding the pecan tree: ‘If I were young again I would go South and devote my life to propagating new species of the pecan. Walnut culture is the leading horticultural product in California, makes more money for us and makes it easier than anything else, and your pecan is superior to our walnut. The longevity of the pecan orchard and its immense earning power make it one of the most profitable and permanent of agricultural investments.’” |
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