Pecans: The Story in a Nutshell

Travel just about anywhere in the southern United States, and you will find pecan trees. The “nut too hard to crack by hand”—the derivation of the pecan’s Algonquian name—is one of the most successful native agricultural crops of North America. So popular are pecans that Thomas Jefferson once wrote home from Paris for a supply, while many people today consider their holidays incomplete without a pecan pie. Jane Manaster’s Pecans, updated from its original 1994 publication, explores the natura…