True confession: This is not the nut I wanted to send you.
Even before I moved to Georgia, I was a peanut acolyte. I eat peanut butter at least once a day and think of ice cream as an excuse to consume more legumes. Naturally, I wanted to find a way to work boiled peanuts into our Middle Georgia box, since the soggy autumnal snack is essential around these parts.
But there’s no easy way to ship green or prepared runner peanuts without courting spoilage, so I settled for pecans (coated in chocolate to sweeten the deal.)
Pecans are native to North America and were critical to some indigenous diets. But they didn’t grow in Georgia until around the turn of the twentieth century, when real estate speculators in the southeast corner of the state planted them to spruce up tracts of otherwise uninteresting land. The trees flourished, and Georgia claimed the nation’s pecan production crown in the 1950s.
It hasn’t relinquished it since, although Hurricane Helene wiped out 70 percent of Georgia’s pecan trees aged 50 years or older.
As for what becomes of all those pecans, pralines and pies are traditional throughout the South. Yet as the pecan market has grown to include Chinese eaters more interested in the nut’s health benefits than brown sugar, it’s just as common for a pecan to end up soaked in brine–kind of like a peanut.
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